ON CALLING A MAN BROTHER

We can all surely agree that Jesus came to make men brothers, and that is such a glorious truth. “When anyone is united to Christ, there is a new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun,” 2 Cor. 5:17 tells us, and we can believe that all who make up this new creation are brothers. When God claims a man as His son, I can claim him as my brother.

And so we recognize this in part by calling a man brother. No one argues that we make a man our brother by calling him such, and but few, if any, would contend we must call him brother if he is our brother. He might be called by his first name, such as John, or even by his last, such as Mr. Smith, and in recent years we have been “brothering” everybody less. And it could be that we have made something of a title of it, especially in the case of preachers, with something like Brother Smith becoming a compound proper noun. It seems somewhat different from John Smith, our brother.

But this is hardly a big deal either way you take it. It is a different kind of problem that I have in mind. We still have lots of folk who use brother in a canonical way, applying it or withdrawing it on the basis of whether the person in question is approved by the party, to put it bluntly. Some of our folk call everyone brother who is in what we denominate as the Church of Christ, of whatever persuasion, but no one else, not even one in the Christian Church or the Disciples of Christ. Others take a narrower view, calling only those brother who are within their fellowship, or what they might call the faithful church. Then there is that emerging element among us, which might be described as “the free spirits,” who are pleased to call all those brother who make up the Christian world, whether Trueblood, or Schaeffer, or Keith Miller. Or else they hardly use the term at all, disdaining it as a religious relic, and so put their relationships on a first name basis or the more formal Mister, Doctor, or what.

We can probably agree that whether or not we call each other brother in addressing one another is not so important, but why we do or do not is very important indeed. Some can not only be brash but even cruel in their use of Mister when it is evident that the one referred to is being excluded. On occasion I have been called Mister Garrett almost as if I were being cursed, though ordinarily that way of being addressed is most acceptable. In party circles to be called Mister, while all others are called brother, is a way of saying, “You are not OK.”

The line drawn between whether one “brothers” a man or does not is usually unclear, but it has to do with his doctrinal purity. One sister that I chanced to meet on the street sometime back was aghast a t all the things she had heard about me, including my questionable occupation of philosophy teacher. “I don’t know whether to call you brother or not,” she told me, rather anxiously. Bless her, she was measuring me by herself, and since I did not conform to her view of a faithful church member, I was really out, not OK. For her to call one “brother” meant that he is endorsed and accepted. I assured her that she was my sister in the Lord because she was in Jesus, and that I loved her as blood kin, and that there wasn’t much she could do about it, whether she called me “brother” or not. The next time I saw her she called me “brother”, explaining that her preacher told her that I was a brother all right, though an erring brother, and so could be called “brother”. But I think that is cheating. To get it perfectly right such ones should address me Brother-in-Error Garrett!

But there is a footnote to be added about that dear sister. Buried deeply in partyism, religion had long been oppressive to her, and she sought peace in the confines of one of our straightest sects. But 10, she at last turned to Jesus and to the peace that he allows, and she now wears a smile that reflects that joy that so long eluded her. And she has discovered that she has many more brothers than she realized, just as many as God has sons.

Maybe this little story has a lesson. Rather than turning our backs upon our sectarian brothers, which may be just as sectarian, let’s love the sectarianism out of them!

Maybe this is what Alexander Campbell was trying to do in his response to his antagonist of many years, Jeremiah Jeter, a prominent Baptist minister of Richmond, Virginia, who obliged his generation with an extended review of Campbell’s teaching, entitled Campbellism Examined. Jeter was hard on Campbell, referring to him as. “a disputant, so ready, adroit, and sarcastic,” and went on to write 50 pages on “Campbellism in its chaos.”

In the exchanges between them everything was “Mr. Campbell” and “Mr. Jeter,” which was a common practice. But in his review of Jeter’s essay, Campbell says: “Our brother Jeter - brother, did I say? Yes, and I will not erase it - our brother Jeter...” Campbell realized that God had sons outside the Restoration Movement, and he acknowledged that Baptists had believed in Jesus and obeyed him in baptism and were therefore his brothers.

Campbell disagreed with some within the Movement as much as he did with Jeter, one of those being Barton W. Stone, who had views on the preexistence of Christ that bore similarity to the old Arian heresy, views that concerned Campbell no little. They too corresponded at length, doing a bit of in-fighting in an effort to work out the differences. One of Campbell’s letters begins with: “Brother Stone: I will call you brother because you once told me that you could conscientiously and devoutly pray to the Lord Jesus Christ as though there was no other God in the universe than he.” Stone responded with the same brotherly felicitation.

The important thing here is not that men who differ are addressing each other as brothers, but that they are accepting each other as brothers. To treat each other as brothers is the big deal, however little or much we may actually use the term.