The End of a Movement?

For those readers who are familiar with the background of the contributors of this journal, you know that we are all part of the Restoration Movement. All three of us have been educated at Stone-Campbell schools. We all agree with and support the principles of the Movement to some measure.

Though each church affiliated with the Restoration Movement maintains autonomy and does not answer to a governing body, all of the churches still gather together at an annual convention call the North American Christian Convention (NACC for short). Basically the convention is a gathering of Christians from across the country (and world at times). No decisions are made. No edicts are handed out. It is just like-minded Christians coming together to worship, learn, and fellowship. Growing up I attended every year to compete with other teenagers in Bible Bowl. I have not gone lately, though my parents and sister continue to make the effort.

However, the convention has fallen on hard financial times lately as the attendance continues to decline. One could attribute this decline to various factors – the downward economic trends, the cost of gas, the rising cost of putting on the program, etc. And though those factors affect the older generation of attendees, I believe the problem lies in the absence of the generations that are ages 40 and under. Few Christian Church believers in this age group know about or feel compelled to support the convention. As a result, I foresee the convention going under within the next 15 years as the older generation dies out and is not replaced by new believers.

Another diminishing resource of the Restoration Movement is the “Christian Standard.” This weekly magazine is filled with articles, lessons, meditations, and news relating to the movement. Like the convention, I believe you would be hard pressed to find many people under the age of 40 regularly reading and taking an interest in the magazine. I only read it when a topic is especially intriguing. I don’t know their financial status, but I believe this magazine along with “The Lookout” could be defunct within a few years.

A few years back, a group of scholars from the movement attempted to increase the scholarship level of the Restoration Movement by publishing “The Stone-Campbell Journal.” The journal contained quality work, but again, I don’t know how they are fairing. I tend to think not as good as they could be.

Finally, though many newer churches and church plants are staffed by men and women from the Restoration Movement, fewer and fewer churches are celebrating this heritage. Even the names “Christian Church” and “Church of Christ” are being traded for “Community Church” or just a simple name like “Lighthouse Church”. I don’t have a problem with the name change, but these are just observations about the distancing from the tradition from which these churches draw their present practices.

The point of all of these observations is simple – I see the “Restoration Movement” ending within the next few years as a new generation of Christians seeks more ecumenical and post-modern approaches to “church”. Though I do not see this evolution as a bad thing, I do know that if the new movement does not replace the old with comparable practices, they will suffer. Hopefully the publications will be replaced with blogs, websites, and other means of communicating between Christians. Hopefully the convention will be replaced with other gatherings of like-minded individuals who are seeking unity. Whatever happens, as long as Christians are attempting to restore the church to the New Testament model, than perhaps the Movement will never die.

A Reply to "A Failed Attempt at Unity - The Restoration Movement"

It is our hope that this blog becomes like the newsletters of yesterday (except without any related costs) in which readers write letters to us and conversations are started that lead all of us to be more fruitful. We have posted a new link in the bottom of the right column. It says, "If you have a question or a suggestion for a journal entry, please feel free to email us." Feel free to use it.

John Nugent replied to my posts "A Failed Attempt At Unity - The Restoration Movement" (Part 1, Part 2).

You may disagree with Campbell that the "intellectual" project he launched is not viable today, nor was it ever. But you make it sound like he was an ivory tower guy who needed to pull his head out of the clouds. I don't get those same vibes. What we see Campbell NOT doing (during a day when every one else was) is importing a finely tuned philosophical system that is beyond the reach of the common man and making that a prerequisite for doing theology. THAT approach is intellectual unity at its purest. Instead, Campbell took habits of thinking and reading that were gaining widespread, indeed worldwide, acceptance by the masses and putting them to work with Scripture alone. This was theology for everyman, and the average Joe found Campbell a thinker he could finally relate to. Of course, when what one reads of Campbell is his most intellectual work, one is tempted to think his project was a purely intellectual one, but all it takes is a brief sit-down in front of the massive collection of Millennial Harbinger volumes to realize his project was a grassroots, church life focused project. In fact, I think our movement's primary contribution to ecumenical conversations is its ecclesial flexibility and openness. While others spend an excessive amount of time speculating about Trinity and transubstantiation, our people were saying "what would it look like if we did communion like this?"

You insist that unity is achieved through shared "actions" not intellectual processes. That's exactly what Campbell was doing. The Church had three major shared actions among all denominations: Lord's Supper, Baptism, and Bible Reading. Campbell focused on these. When it came to hermeneutics, Campbell sat down with average Joe who always felt unworthy to read the Bible because he could never understand the deep theological prerequisites necessary for a valid reading. Campbell's advice to him was: "You read the newspaper, right? Well, read your Bible that way. And another thing, be sure to humbly receive it as God's word and do what it says." Of course, when Campbell had to justify this approach intellectually before intellectuals he speaks to them on intellectual terms, but don’t mistake these contextual conversations for an intellectualist approach to the Bible because that is not what Campbell recommended.

Regarding the project of identifying interpretive methods today and using them to unite, I think there is plenty of helpful fodder out there. Obviously you don't begin with highly contested methods that have not gained unity. You begin with methods that are gaining unity. It is not clear to me that the watch-a-movie-and-read-whatever-you-want-into-it" approach is fostering widespread agreement. Those producers may be gaining widespread exposure and they may have groupies in every state, but the masses are not buying it. That is not the way they read the paper or want people to interpret their speech actions. It's not what their college profs teach and Hollywood hardly represents the heartbeat of America. It represents the heartbeat of the entertainment world. Campbell was building off of a much more widely popular approach.

Narrative theory, on the other hand, is gaining momentum today. We are beginning to agree that dissecting a text as if it was a corpse to get at the root of every jot and tittle intention of the author is no longer the best way to read a book, although it may be helpful in a supplemental way. Rather we find it much more appealing to enter into the narrative world of the project, to provisionally accept some of its borderline presuppositions, and to try to hear the message conveyed by the work as a whole. We are agreeing that the forest needs as much attention as each individual tree. Many people would hear that and say, duh, that's common sense. My response is: Exactly! But that's not how they read the Bible. They microanalyze every phrase and get stuck at every one-liner that is hard to swallow and they miss the story. They obsess about theories of inspiration, composition, and authorship. The Bible has become a book not to read and enjoy but to read and defend. This is partly because of how Scripture is taught in Colleges. I am calling for a shift away from obsessing about introductory issues toward entering the narrative world of the text. A hermeneutic of unity teaches our students that what matters about Scripture is the message God is communicating through it not who wrote it, when, and with what degree of divine influence.

I am not convinced Campbell is as easily defeated as the strawman he is set up to be. Campbell did not avoid all that was extra-biblical. He never sought to. He sought to marginalize what was extra-biblical. There is a big difference there that many people overlook. Campbell had a higher view of opinion than most people's brains today can handle. He could just as easily worship with a deist as a strict trinitarian because he refused to make their metaphysical speculations a matter of fellowship. What he sought to do was push extra-biblical topics out of the spotlight. They were not to be topics for preaching. We must preach the Gospel that unites. There will have to be conversations about what extra-biblical aspects of church life need to be dealt with (carpeting, A/C units, church camps, etc), but we do not pretend our ideas about these things are so strong that they should be the subject of our unity gatherings and Bible studies. It's not either we do extra-biblical things or not, but how much emphasis we place on them.

Similarly, Campbell did not believe that God stopped revealing himself in Deistic fashion. No one who's read him much accuses him of being deistic. Rather, he affirmed that what God has revealed to different individuals or even churches post-NT is not going to be the basis of worldwide Church unity. So God may convince Church X through a vision to start a homeless ministry on corner Y, but that revelation is binding on that Church alone, not all churches everywhere. What God revealed in Scripture is different, according to Campbell. What he revealed there is for all people everywhere. They will not apply it in the same way in an effort to be sensitive to their context, but it remains normative as a guide to their conduct. Campbell is willing to say, “God convicted you to do A, great! But be careful not assume that because he convicted you to do so that his will is for everyone to do likewise.” It does not surprise me that when God wants to get a Catholic’s attention, he gives them a vision of Mary. It does not surprise me that when he wants to grip a Pentecostal, he afflicts them with tongues. God meets people where they are. But Catholics are mistaken when they use such experiences to confirm the timeless validity of their Marian dogmas and Pentecostals are misguided to make tongue-speaking a necessary sign for genuine conversion. It is not clear to me that Campbell is saying anything more than don’t do this – if we make these mistakes our division will increase.

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.

A Failed Attempt at Unity - The Restoration Movement (Part 1)

I read parts of Christianity Restored by Alexander Campbell earlier this year.

My initial thought in reading the book was that Alexander Campbell threw away all of the established creeds and created a creed that was much more complex in what could be described as a “hermeneutical approach” creed.

Here are two defining quotes:

"Our opposition to creeds arose from a conviction, that whether the opinions in them were true or false, they were hostile to the uniion, peace, harmony, purity, and joy of christians; and adverse to the conversion of the world to Jesus Christ."

"All the differences in religious opinion and sentiment, amongst those who acknowledge the Bible, are occassioned by false principles of interpretation, or by a misapplication of the true principles. There is no law, nor standard--literary, moral, or religious--that can coerce human thought or action, by only promulging and acknowledging it. If a law can effect any thing, our actions must be conformed to it. Were all students of the Bible taught to apply the same rules of interpretation to its pages, there would be a greater uniformity in opinion and sentiment, than ever resulted from the simple adoption of any written creed."

Campbell then goes on to explain his hermeneutical principles for eighty-five pages. Instead of having a ten point creed, he produced an eighty-five page psuedo-creed. It was his firm belief that one must share hermeneutical methods in order to come to the same conclusions. I think he was somewhat correct in his belief that a unity could be achieved if we all shared the same hermeneutical methods; however, that unity would not be a genuine unity. It would be an “intellectual unity” that scholars could share but it would not unite the masses.

Alexander Campbell believed that intellectual unity would bring about a genuine unity; however, history shows that we can be intellectually divided and still have Christian unity or we can have intellectual unity and still be divided. I could beat my head against a wall trying to convince someone to intellectually agree with me. It would be more fruitful to get them to participate with me in action. Unity starts with sharing actions rather than sharing intellectual processes. Shared hermeneutics would result in a shared theology but that does not always translate into a shared spirituality. If we share actions, our differing theology might not matter all that much.

A friend of mine wrote: “Rather than ask how 18-19th century methods of reading ancient texts may guide the church's reading of Scripture, we might ask what contemporary methods are bearing fruit analyzing ancient texts and how such methods may be used to foster a shared hermeneutic for today.” The problem is that modern methods vary as the wind and location of the circumstances the scholar finds himself in. It seems that – at least in secular fields, particularly literature – the original intent of the author is irrelevant next to the interpretation of the reader. People seemed to be enthralled with movies like The Fountain where the writer/director refuses to tell what the point is and proclaims that everyone's interpretation is valid. This modern day approach cannot bring about a shared hermeneutic that would result in an intellectual unity.

Campbell's approach which was not even successful is no longer even practical. Unity will only come through humble communities of believers listening to the will of God.