A Failed Attempt at Unity - The Restoration Movement (Part 2)

Part one is here.

The main problem I struggle with in dealing with the thoughts of Alexander Campbell is that I am enthralled by the idea that we should speak only on thoughts that the Bible is clear on and remain silent on the rest. I wish it was possible, but I just cannot see it as being so. Whenever we decide to step away from the intellectual and put our beliefs into practice, we will inevitably be doing things in an area of that is extrabiblical. When we take action on whether to hire a minister or not, to have a building or not, to give money to a certain cause or not, we make a stance on something that is not an essential in the Bible, yet they are all areas that we must take a stance on. Intellectual unity on the essentials by itself cannot not bring about genuine unity.

In order to take Campbell's approach one has to take a near-deistic approach to Christianity. Let me label that approach “Biblistic” if you will. In this approach God quit revealing truth to people at the time of the writing of Revelation or whatever book one would argue was the last written book of the Bible. In this belief Campbell came closest to replicating for biblical studies what Bacon did for science. But the biblistic approach is extrabiblical in itself by making the statement that all revelation is done. Campbell's approach has to be wrong because it is self-contradicting and not internally consistent.

Campbell's attempt at unity was genuine and well meant, but it failed. His approach will always fail no matter what generation attempts to mimic it unless Christianity were limited to being a purely intellectual endeavor. It is necessary for every generation to adopt extrabiblical practices in order to properly demonstrate the gospel to our culture. Doing church in a house almost seems simplistic enough that we can avoid extrabiblical actions, but simple church even has many extrabiblical actions. Extrabiblical actions cannot be avoided; we must be responsible and sensitive to insure that all of our extrabiblical teachings and practices are beneficial to the body of Christ rather than divisive.

A reply to my thoughts by John Nugent is here.