Principles of Unity and Fellowship . . .

PREACHING AND TEACHING: A VITAL DISTINCTION
(Part 1: The Thesis Stated)

"This is no mere speculative distinction," Alexander Campbell insisted in his 1857 address to the Christian Missionary Society (Lectures and Ad-dresses, p. 537). "It was appreciated, fully understood and acted upon, or carried out, in the apostolic ministry," he went on to say, referring to Acts 5:42 as one place where the distinction is clearly set forth.

We can rather say that it is a distinction that the Holy Spirit makes, and should we not be just as careful to recognize a distinction that the scriptures make as we are to avoid creating a distinction that the scriptures do not make? The term priest is an example of this, for the Spirit applies this function to all of God's children, while some theologians seek to create a special priesthood. Minister is another, which is also rendered deacon or servant. Some claim for this term a distinctive role that the scriptures do not recognize.

It is therefore a rule that works both ways: we should not make distinctions that the Spirit does not make, and we should recognize the distinctions that the Spirit does make.

In view of this particular series on principles of unity and fellowship, we should at the outset make clear how the distinction between preaching and teaching is related to the larger problem of a divided church. It is our position that oneness in Christ and the fellowship of the saints is rooted in the preaching of the gospel. That is, when one hears and obeys the gospel, he enters into Christ and is thereby in the fellowship with all others in Christ. It is therefore the gospel, the good news, that brings one into Christ, or the thing preached as 1 Cor. 1:21 puts it. The gospel is a specific message, kerugma, made up of facts and not theories or interpretations. When these facts are preached, believed and obeyed, the result is a newly-born child of God. That child is a brother or sister to all others through-out the entire world. He or she is in the church and in the fellowship.

Teaching, didache, is something distinctly different from preaching. It is the instruction or education that the newly-born child is to receive once he has entered God's family. While preaching, kerugma, brings one into the school of Christ, teaching, didache, is the curriculum he is taught during his lifetime in the school. While it is the gospel that brings us into the fellowship, it is teaching or doctrine that strengthens and enriches the fellowship.

If this thesis can be sustained, it follows that unity and fellowship are not based on a correct understanding and adherence to all that the New Covenant scriptures teach (or are supposed to teach!), but rather upon one's relationship to Christ as reflected in his or her obedience to the gospel. It means that one may be but a babe in Christ, or rather dull of learning in comparison to some of God's more gifted children, or simply wrong about a lot of conclusions he has drawn from his studies, and still be right about what is most important, his kinship to Jesus based on his obedience to the gospel.

This means also that the gospel is not the whole of the "New Testament," as is so commonly believed among Churches of Christ. The "New Testament," (more correctly, the New Covenant scriptures) is mostly teaching or didache, that is, instruction on how to be a Christian. Only that part that sets forth the good news of Jesus as the Savior of the world and how to become a Christian is the gospel or preaching. The gospel, therefore, is what brings us into Christ; the doctrine is what builds us up in Christ. When we come to see this distinction, the "New Testament" will become a new book to us — and we will have a more scriptural view of unity and fellowship.

We do not, therefore, have to see everything eye-to-eye in order to be united in Christ or to enjoy the fellowship of the Spirit together. Unity is based on our accepting Jesus (the gospel). Fellowship, which simply means "the shared life" in Christ, is not contingent on our understanding alike all the teaching of the New Covenant scriptures, for this is impossible since we are all in different grades. It is based only upon the gospel. If one believes in Jesus as Lord and has been baptized into him, he is our brother or sister — even if he as yet has comprehended but a small part of the apostles' doctrine.

This is to say that our differences about the millennium, the time and frequency of the Supper, the kind of music we are to have in the assembly, or whether we do missionary work through agencies has not one thing to do with whether we are in the the fellowship together. These things only mean that we differ on how we interpret certain aspects of the doctrine — or better still, the silence of the doctrine.

Some of my Texas and Tennessee brethren really get up tight when I suggest that Billy Graham is a gospel preacher. Since they see the whole of the New Covenant revelation as the gospel, they insist that Graham has to teach the truth about every single point of doctrine in order to be a gospel preacher. 1 point out that he is a gospel preacher when he lifts up Jesus as the risen Lord, like Peter did on Pentecost. 1 wish he would make clear the way that believers are to respond to the gospel, like Peter did, but even if the terms are not given I can rejoice. that Christ is preached. The terms are not per se part of the gospel, for Peter had preached the gospel before they ever asked him about how they were to obey it. It was, after all, the gospel that had cut them to the heart and moved them to cry out.

In Philip. 1:15f Paul explains that some preach Christ out of envy and rivalry, while others preach him out of love and sincerity. Then he says, "Whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is preached, and in that I rejoice." That is why I rejoice in Graham's work. One does not have to preach baptism in order to proclaim Christ, for while baptism is the believer's way of responding to the gospel, it is not the gospel itself. Other-wise Paul would never have said, "Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the gospel" (1 Cor. 1 :17).

This business of making all our opinions and interpretations of the scriptures part of the gospel is but to distort the gospel. If a church has the Sunday School, it is untrue to the gospel. It must have acappella music to be true to the gospel. One cannot be a gospel preacher if he supports the Herald of Truth TV-Radio program or if he is premillennial. A preacher has to be cut down to our size and made to fit our sectarian mold in order to be a gospel preacher. And it is we ourselves that are the most sectarian when we do that.

A major hurdle in overcoming our sectarian hang-ups is, therefore, to understand what the gospel is and what preaching the gospel means. The scriptures make it clear that the gospel is the message of salvation to the lost, as Paul shows in 1 Cor. 15: 1-8, and it consists of certain facts about Jesus, centered in his death, burial and resurrection. The facts are indisputable. One believes them or he does not. There is no ground for opinions or theories. One accepts it as a fact that Jesus died for our sins or he does not. So, we can all unite on those facts, and it is the event of Jesus in history and his exaltation as the risen Christ that is the ground of our fellowship one with another. Once in the fellowship where we share a common life in Jesus we are continually instructed in the apostles' doctrine, but here there will be and can be differences without the fellowship being threatened?

This is the basis for one of our great slogans. "In matters of faith (the gospel) unity; in matters of opinion (various interpretations of doctrine) liberty; in all things, love." Or as the pioneers often expressed it, the basis of unity and fellowship is the "one Lord, one faith, one baptism," which was another way of summarizing the essentials.

Campbell believed that we must make this distinction between preaching and teaching if our ministry is to be effective: "The difference between preaching and teaching Christ; so palpable in the apostolic age, though now confounded in the theoretic theologies of our day, must be well defined and clearly distinguished in the mind, in the style and utterance of an evangelist or missionary who would be a workman that needs not to blush, a workman covetous of the best gifts and of the richest rewards." (Lectures and Addresses, p. 536) He emphasized this distinction all his life. To the Kentucky Convention of 1853 he declared that:

Preaching the gospel and teaching the converts are as distinct and distinguishable employments as enlisting an army and training it, or as creating a school and teaching it. Unhappily for the church and for the world, this distinction, if at all conceded as legitimate, is obliterated or annulled in almost all Protestant Christendom — Mill. Harb., 1853, p. 541

He goes on to bemoan the fact that evangelists who proclaim the gospel to the lost and the pastors who minister the doctrine to the church are alike and without distinction called preachers. He makes it clear that the real problem is that they do not know what the gospel is.

Campbell's illustration of enrolling students in school is a fortunate one since that is the point of the Great Commission as given by Jesus in Mt. 28:18-19. "Make disciples of all nations" is what the gospel does. "Baptizing them" is the means of enrolling believers into the school of Christ. "Teaching them to observe all things" is the continued instruction in the apostles' doctrine. So, they are matriculated by believing the gospel and being baptized. They are taught in the apostles' curriculum (didache) from that point on, always advancing as disciples in the school of Christ, each according to his ability.

What kind of a school would it be that continues day after day to enroll the students over and over again? Or what about any army that keeps on inducting soldiers but never gets around to training them? And what of a church that is forever preaching to its own members, people who have long since heard the good news and obeyed it. Campbell is saying that the gospel is to be preached to the lost, not to the church.

 

Campbell puts this distinction as succinctly as possible: "To make the facts known is to preach, and to explain the meaning of the facts is to teach." In the 1853 Millennial Harbinger he deals with this "solid and important distinction which commends itself to every person of discernment" by defining the roles of preacher and teacher. "The preacher singly aims at the conversion of his hearers, while the teacher intends the development of a passage, a doctrine, a theory, or in vindicating the tenets he has espoused." He goes on to say that the preacher reclaims the heart white the teacher cultivates the under-standing and enlarges the conceptions of his pupil. And finally: "The preacher aims at producing faith in his auditory; the teacher at imparting knowledge to his disciple" (p. 546). He recognizes that some servants of the church are both preachers and teachers.

Again in the 1846 Millennial Harbinger, after quoting the eminent Prof. George Campbell of Aberdeen, Scotland to the effect that "No moral instructions or doctrinal explanations, given either by our Lord or by his Apostles, are ever, either in the Gospels or the Acts, denominated preaching," he goes on to conclude: "Thus we find that the preacher's mission is al-together to the world, and that he takes upon himself another office entirely, when he presumes to teach the church."

Alex Campbell then raises the question of who is the teacher in the church? "In the divinely constituted plan, which leaves nothing imperfect, there was an officer appointed for this express purpose. He is variously denominated Bishop, Elder, Pastor, and Teacher, all of which mean essentially the same officer."

Those of us who are heirs of Campbell's thought and suppose we have restored primitive Christianity would do well to look seriously to these next lines from his pen: "Me-thinks 1 see some knowing one curl his lip as he imagines a church taught by our Bishops or Elders. Well, I grant that there is some reason for his sneer, but he will please remember that I am not looking at things as they exist at present, but I am looking into the mirror of divine truth, in order to find out what they ought to be." (p. 318)

This distinction between preaching and teaching, or gospel and doctrine, remains vital to Campbell to his dying day. The last two articles that he wrote, in 1865 (a few months before his death), he set forth one more time his view of the evangelist as a missionary to the lost and the gospel as a series of specific facts about Jesus. In his very last article he listed the seven facts that make up the gospel. They are remarkably similar to the list drawn up 75 years later by C. H. Dodd, the British scholar, who jarred the scholarly world with his learned presentation on the difference between preaching and teaching, or kerugma and didache, in his now famous book, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Development. The clergy across the world hardly knew what to think when the learned Prof. Dodd told them that most of what they call preaching in the pulpits of the modern church today is not preaching at all, but teaching. He went on to lay down distinctions that brought him fame, distinctions that are remarkably similar to what our own Alexander Campbell set forth three generations earlier.

We shall continue this line of thought in our next, dealing especially with gospel and doctrine, and we will give you more details on the Campbell-Dodd definition of the gospel, along with other scholarly sources that support this vital distinction.

In this installment we have, for the most part, set forth our thesis on preaching and teaching. In our next we shall defend the thesis, especially in the light of scripture. And our thesis is this: only belief and obedience to the gospel can be made terms of unity and fellowship, and not all the deductions drawn from the apostles' doctrine, however important these might be. Or to put it another way: the kerugma (preaching) brings us into the fellowship and makes us one in Christ; the didache (teaching) strengthens, deepens, and enriches the fellowship, where there will be (and has to be) diversity of opinion.

In the meantime I would like to give you an assignment. Kindly and lovingly ask your church leaders these questions: (1) Is there a distinction between preaching and teaching, and between gospel and doctrine? (2) If there is a distinction, what is it? (3) If not, why do such passages as Acts 5:42 use both terms? Are they merely synonyms?

I would like to hear from you as to the response you get. But now be careful, for the questions are mildly explosive. And remember that Camp-bell says that only the discerning will see or care to see the distinction. More next time.  — the Editor

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