Category: Church (Page 17 of 61)

If, as we have noted in this space this week, the Church cannot escape its past and if the Church is influenced in both negative and positive ways by its history and tradition, it seems like we ought to embrace this history in order to examine it. It’s ours anyway; we belong to it. Why not learn from it? Why not study the things we find misguided so we can avoid them in our time today and incorporate the things that might actually benefit our spiritual formation and our passing on of the faith?

I’ll conclude my thoughts on Dr. Keith Stanglin’s article “Restorationism and Church History: Strange Bedfellows?” with today’s post. Honestly, this has been much more a re-hash of his work — not too much original thought from me.

Keith suggests we engage in what a lot of people call “retrieval theology.”

“This is not a call to re-create or ape the faith and practice of a specific time or place from the past; not every thought or practice in church history is equally good or relevant for us. It means learning from the wisdom of our ancestors and appropriating the best that it has to offer for the sake of the church today.”

There are many valid and good reasons for embracing all of church history. One, it gives us our identity; knowing our past helps us know who we are and from where we came. Two, it gives us wisdom; most of the questions and debates we face today have been handled or anticipated at some point in the church’s history. Third, we could gain some needed perspective from the study of church history; the history calls us to a holy balance. Knowing the history of our practices and traditions will help us recognize the swing of the pendulum over time. Then we can start to get a good idea of the pendulum’s position and direction and momentum. Then we’ll be better equipped to take the pendulum where it needs to go or, as Keith puts it, “to stand in its way and push back before it goes too far.”

Studying church history can confirm or challenge our interpretations of Scripture. Maybe this is one of the main reasons we resist it. We like to think our interpretation and practices are pure and strictly biblical and come from an un-biased heart. I know that’s what a lot of us have thought. I remember being told at an early age that if everybody in the world would just read the Bible with clear eyes and an open, honest heart, without any preconceived notions, then everybody would believe and worship just like we do. I still occasionally hear versions of that today! When will we admit that a lot of our “distinctives” in Churches of Christ are not born of slam-dunk biblical arguments or unambiguous passages of Scripture? Most of our distinctive practices are not wrong — I think I’d argue they are all faithful and good and beneficial to a life of discipleship to Jesus. But our arguments come from history, not from Scripture. Every Sunday communion and acappella worship and baptism for the forgiveness of sins comes from what our own guy Everett Ferguson calls “historical foreground.” It’s the historical norm that confirms no baptizing for the dead AND observing the Lord’s Meal every Lord’s Day.

Finally, this concluding section from Keith’s article, with which I strongly agree and advocate:

“Restorationism and church history need not be an odd couple, but can be more like the dynamic duo. I personally applaud and support the genius of Thomas Campbell’s restoration vision: The unity of all Christians by means of restoration based on Scripture. Thus articulated, I stand behind the restoration vision. But I must take leave of any interpretation and application of Scripture in the church that seeks to bypass nearly two millennia of church history, or tries to read the Bible as if no one has read it before, or tries to do theology and worship as if they have not been done for the last 1,900 years. The “Bible only,” in this sense, has never worked.”

Retrieval theology is about embracing and knowing our past — all of it —in order to benefit the Church today and into the future. It requires the discipline of learning from our mistakes, the stamina to refuse to repeat bad decisions and bad practices, and the hard work of incorporating the good and faithful from our past into our present. It also demands a humility in the knowledge that we’re not the first ones to attempt to follow Jesus, we’re not the only ones, we’re not the only ones who have done some really good work by God’s grace, and we’re not the only ones who need God’s grace to cover us in the things we’ve really messed up.

Peace,

Allan

“Nothing ought to be received into the faith or worship of the church; or be made a term of communion amongst Christians, that is not as old as the New Testament.” ~Declaration and Address, Thomas Campbell, 1809

Our Stone-Campbell Movement was motivated by the desire to unite all Christians around the Bible only. The belief was that if we put aside all human doctrines and all human creeds and traditions and focused only as the Scriptures as our model and guide, all followers of Jesus would come together in one unified body. The ideal was to “restore” the New Testament church and for all of us to be New Testament Christians. One of the unfortunate consequences of this powerful vision has been our reluctance to embrace any church history or tradition before 1809. We ignore church history. We resist it, reject it.

My brother, Dr. Keith Stanglin, wrote an insightful article for the Christian Studies theological journal a couple of years ago that outlined a couple of key consequences that have resulted from our faithful pursuit of a New Testament Church ideal. The article is titled “Restorationism and Church History: Strange Bedfellows?” and you can read it in its entirety by clicking here. I’ll be using his article as a guide for this discussion that may take us through the remainder of this week.

The italicized statement at the top of this post is from the founding document of our Restoration Movement, Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address. This is proposition five, stated right after proposition four which said only the commands and ordinances of the New Testament will be binding on the church. Just as proposition four marginalizes the Old Testament, this proposition five marginalizes all church history. As Keith writes (or am I supposed to say, “as Stanglin writes?” This is kinda weird), “According to this rule, just as we should not consult Mosaic faith or tabernacle worship in the restoration project, neither should we consult Nicene faith or its liturgy.”

OK. Clearly, there’s a lot to consider here. Let’s just take this one step, one day, at a time.

“Nothing not as old as the New Testament” is a problem.

First, let’s consider what Keith calls the problem of logic. Receiving nothing into the church that is not as old as the New Testament is a self-contradictory statement. The rule doesn’t even meet its own criterion. People say things like this all the time: “There is no such thing as absolute truth” and “You should only believe statements that can be empirically proven.” Each of those statements fails to stand up to its own requirements. The same thing is true for Campbell’s rule that has had, and continues to have, a powerful influence on our Stone-Campbell churches. The statement itself is not as old as the New Testament!

There is also the problem of definition. What does Campbell mean when he says “the New Testament”? If he means the standardized list of 27 New Testament books, the earliest we can date that is toward the end of the fourth century. So, does Campbell mean “nothing not as old as the fourth century”? No, that’s probably not what Campbell meant. He certainly meant the time period in which the New Testament books were written. He’s talking about the first century. So, does Campbell mean “nothing ought to be received into the faith or worship of the church that was not believed or practiced in the first century?” Well, maybe. But then that gets complicated because the 27-book collection of the New Testament was not even thought of by the end of the first century. If our Bible is going to be the Bible of the first century church, then it must be the 39-books of the Old Testament. Only.

See where this takes us? The whole thing is a consistency issue. We can’t hold to Campbell’s rule, we certainly can’t impose it on our churches, if we’re going to use a 66-book canon of Scripture as our rule and guide. As Keith writes, “It is for similar reasons that we also cannot give anything more than passing consideration to slogans such as ‘No creed but Christ,’ and ‘No creed but the Bible.’ Whatever these slogans and the [statement] possess in rhetorical force they lack in coherence and meaning.”

I say all this to just lay a foundation for the discussion that will follow tomorrow and the next day or days. We’re not making any conclusions here yet. I’m certainly not disparaging Campbell’s inspiring and God-ordained vision for uniting all disciples of Jesus together as one universal body of believers. It’s not only a noble ideal, it’s the will of our crucified and risen Lord. The suggestion is this: maybe our churches should at least listen to the wisdom of the Christian believers through the ages. I’m not saying we should blindly adhere to everything that’s gone before. I’m not suggesting we ought to swallow everything that’s been believed before and obey everything that’s been practiced before. But I believe we should probably let the “church fathers and mothers, the medieval scholastics and mystics, the reformers and restorers all have a seat at the table. It means hearing the voice of the past with discernment. It means having a ‘critical reverence’ for the historic Christian tradition.”

We have traditionally ignored or flat-out rejected most church history as formative for us in any way. We typically view all church history before 1809 as corrupt men and women practicing faithless apostasy and dividing Christ’s body with scandalous squabbles over insignificant issues. As Keith observes, whether we invite them to the table or not, we are all strongly influenced and shaped by ancient church tradition and history. Whether we acknowledge it or not.

Stay tuned.

Peace,

Allan