LETTERS TO FELLOW EDITORS

(The following two letters by the editor of this journal may be of interest to our readers. The first is to William S. Cline, new editor of the Firm Foundation, while the second is to Bobbie Lee Holley, who is yet in her first year as editor of Mission. The second letter appeared in the October issue of Mission and we reproduce it here with permission of the editor. We have not yet heard whether Editor Cline plans to include the first letter among the responses he requested. I would hope that there might be more of this kind of exchange between our editors. I especially urge more discussion on the nature of the church and the nature of our own heritage. --- the Editor)

To the Editor, Firm Foundation

Congratulations upon your new beginning. Since you invite responses, I have a word concerning your very first article. Dr. Warren does not meet the issue in insisting that the only Christians are those in the church of Christ, for virtually all believers agree that if one is a Christian he is a part of the Body of Christ or Christ’s church. The issue is whether those people who take the name “the church of Christ” or “the Church of Christ,” generally associated with the Gospel Advocate, the Firm Foundation, and such colleges as Freed-Hardeman and ACU, are exclusively the church of Christ and therefore the only Christians. The issue is what Dr. Warren means by “the church of Christ.”

He closed his essay by asking, “What, then, can a man mean if he says, ‘We are not the only Christians?’” There is nothing new in the claim to be a Christian only. It was a motto of our pioneers when they launched the movement “to unite the Christians in all the sects,” the plea being We are Christians only but not the only Christians. It was a plea for unity. While believers could never agree to being Baptist Christians or Presbyterian Christians, they could agree to being just Christians, Christians only. Our pioneers believed there were Christians in all the denominations, else they would not have started a movement to unite them. One is not a Christian because he is a Baptist or a Presbyterian but because he is in Christ and a part of the church catholic, just as we are Christians for the same reason, not because we belong to “the Church of Christ,” which since around 1890 has become a distinct religious body or denomination. If we are not a denomination with our own exclusive name, colleges, seminaries, papers, missions, publishing houses, it would be interesting for Dr. Warren to tell us what we would have to do to be one. Others, including the Christian Church, make the same claim. Are we not a denomination because we say we are not?

To the Editor, Mission

While I appreciate your invitation to respond to the three reviews of my book The Stone-Campbell Movement, I feel like the man who was being run out of town on a rail, who said, “If it weren’t for the honor of all this I had just as soon walk!”

Whatever else may be said of my history, it has been the most reviewed of anything like it. All three churches have issued histories in recent years, but my book has been the subject of more reviews, pro and con, than the three others combined. There is an important reason why. Each of the other three said what was supposed to be said. While fine books, they were “house” jobs, so critical reviews were few. My book is at least impartial in that it treats all three churches of the Movement alike, according to the facts, as the author interpreted those facts.

College Press, representing one of these churches, is to be commended for leaving me free, even when pressures were applied, to tell it like it happened. When copy proofs of some of the chapters were circulated among leaders at the North American Christian Convention, they “took off like Roman candles,” according to the publisher. In deference to “editor bishops” still living, I agreed not to call any names but simply tell what the journal said and did!

President Thompson of Emmanuel School of Religion warned in one of the introductions that “Everyone will not like this book,” but I am nonetheless impressed with the abundance of commendation that has come from the rank and file. And it was to them that I was writing more than to the scholars. It is not exactly a “country and western” book, but it is anecdotal and is written from the perspective of a journalist or reporter. Scholars can hardly be expected to appreciate this, and they can be forgiven for seeing history largely in terms of their special interests. Even though the book has eighteen chapters and 739 pages, some specialists have chosen to judge the book in the light of one or two chapters. The rank and file, on the other hand, are more interested in “the story,” as to what really happened, and less concerned for minutiae. And they like the anecdotes, with many reporting that history can be fun after all.

As for your three reviewers, I appreciate their painstaking labor, and if and when I revise the book I will consider each criticism carefully, some of which will prove most helpful in a revised edition. While they are wrong in some of the details (Joe Dampier is the only living member of the original Restudy Commission, Dean Walker serving later; Barton Stone did write in the present tense in 1827, insisting that “we have not separated from the Presbyterian church at large”), they are nonetheless appreciated and heeded.

I am persuaded that your readers, like mine, are not so much interested in the myriad of details that reviewers are prone to deal with, but with the main thrust of a book, or with its guts, if it has any. I would that the reviewers of The Stone-Campbell Movement address themselves more to these propositions, which I believe are clearly set forth in the book.

1. The Stone-Campbell Movement was a unity movement. It was in fact three unity movements that became one, despite their diversity. The earliest documents attest to this. It was a passion for the unity of all believers that launched the movements, united them, and sustained them without any open splits for two generations.

2. It was not a restoration movement in the sense that that term is usually employed, which is that “the true church,” which can be identified in exact detail in the New Testament, ceased to exist, and had to be “restored” (not reformed!). I have yet to find that Barton W. Stone (the rightful founder of the Movement if we name but one) ever referred to “restoration” even once, while unity was his constant theme. He often referred to his and Campbell’s work as “the reformation” or “the 19th century reformation.” This means that he recognized that the church has always existed, just as Christ said it would, but that it needs renewal or reformation, as it always has.

3. Walter Scott spoke of the “restored gospel” and Alexander Campbell of a “restoration of the ancient order,” but like Stone, this was in order to reform the church that had existed since Pentecost. Campbell was fond of referring to a restoration of “the primitive faith,” but he never (insofar as I have been able to ascertain) referred to restoring the church itself. He thus called his work “the New Reformation,” which involved restoring to the church (that did exist) what he believed was wanting, particularly unity, the Bible, and the Lord’s day and Lord’s supper as ordinances, along with baptism for remission of sins.

4. The restoration heresy, as above defined, was dominant in the Radical Reformation, especially with the Anabaptists, and was then and always has been divisive, so that there have been upwards of 200 sects of restorationism, each presuming to be “the true church,” duly restored after the New Testament pattern. In my book I told of the massive research of George Williams of Harvard, who found restorationism inherent in the sects of the Radical Reformation, which rejected Luther’s Reformation and counted all churches as false and themselves as the only true Christians. This is restorationism, but it is not the position of the pioneers of the Stone-Campbell Movement, who called themselves reformers and their efforts as “the reformation.” They always recognized other believers as Christians, and Thomas Campbell launched his unity movement with “The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one.” He thus insisted that the church existed and that it was one before he ever launched his movement. This one principle alone precludes any possibility of making restorationists of the Campbells.

5. But restorationism, with its attendant legalism and exclusivism, was a force in the Movement from the outset. This became evident to Alexander Campbell in the negative response he received to his Lunenberg Letter in which he conceded the unimmersed to be Christians. While he saw his people as Christians only, there were many who believed they were the only Christians. When this view gained dominance, which it did following the death of Campbell, it divided the Movement that was launched to unite the Christians in all the sects.

6. All three churches (denominations) growing out of this unity effort have betrayed their heritage. Christian Churches and Churches of Christ have failed by adopting restorationism and presuming themselves to be the “one true church” to the exclusion of others, and one of these churches does not even accept the other one as part of “the Lord’s church,” which is the tragic price of restorationism. These two churches call not for unity in diversity as did their forebears, but for conformity based upon a peculiar (and differing) interpretation of “the New Testament pattern.” While the Disciples have properly rejected restorationism and preserved a passion for unity, they have lost their passion for “a church founded upon the Bible,” to quote their own pioneers, and appear to be stymied by structures, both ecclesial and ecumenical. Our forebears sought unity among believers, convinced that this emphasis would take care of ecclesial or structural union.

7. There is however a remnant in all these churches that have the spirit of the Stone-Campbell Movement, and these generalizations clearly do not apply to all leaders and congregations. There is in fact a substantial reaction against the sectism and exclusivism that made havoc of a glorious heritage.

From the various reviews of my book I have had but two real surprises. One out of Abilene, from a teacher of Restoration history, was that I erred mainly in seeing our heritage as a unity movement more than as a restoration movement. Since all the founding documents (at least five in number) are unity documents, with only one of them even mentioning restoration, that criticism surprised me. That professor would have to reject’ the slogan, “Christian unity is our business,” not to mention “In matters of faith, unity, etc.” But that illustrates what has happened to us: restorationism is our business these days, not unity.

The other surprise was from a Mission review, which was that my book in some ways tells more about me than it does the Movement. But I presume that I am not allowed to conclude that that is why it is selling so well!

I am not surprised by the reaction to my challenge of restorationism. It is worse than taking the angel Moroni from the Mormons! And much worse than taking Westminster from the Presbyterians. One would think that restorationism is in the New Testament! I concede that we are probably stuck with restoration (but not the ism, please), so I agree with those who seek to redefine it, such as Dean Walker’s “renewal through recovery,” more recently popularized by Carl Ketcherside, or make it a synonym for reformation, as Campbell did. But this calls for a change in attitude toward other churches and other Christians, not simply a new definition.

There are those who want me to repent, and I promise to do so if they will find in our history the likes of Barton W. Stone ever saying “Let restorationism be our polar star.” The way it has read all these years, to the shame of most of us, is “Let Christian unity be our polar star.”

History book or no, I cast my lot with those who believe we should look to that polar star, for it will bear us along on the church’s intended course, the redemption of a lost world.