We Must Recover Our Heritage As A Unity People . . .

WHAT MUST THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
DO TO BE SAVED? (4)

In the last installment I observed that if the Churches of Christ are to be saved as a viable witness to our divided and troubled world they must once and for all repudiate their divisive ways. Since separating ourselves from the Disciples of Christ back in the 1890’s, a division that was formally recognized in the Census of 1906, we have continued to divide and sub-divide at the rate of at least one new faction each decade.

These divisions sometimes strike home with cruel irony, for brothers in the same family who grew up in the same congregation and went away to the same college and both made preachers find themselves on different sides of “the issue” that is being made a test of fellowship. Family reunions are a problem since the brothers can no longer “fellowship” each other or even speak to each other. Families are thus torn asunder by our inexcusable factions. We have brought pain to ourselves and disgust to our neighbors. Because of our deplorable partyism and all the legalisms that go with it we have for decades been going to church more and enjoying it less. Petty quarrels have taken joy from our religion.

In my last piece I urged that this be corrected by an open repudiation of our divisive ways. We must announce publicly that we have sinned against our Lord’s prayer for the unity of his people; that we have been a disgrace to the community of believers by having a half dozen “faithful” Churches of Christ in a single town, none of whom have any fellowship with the others; and that we have tragically failed to show the one sure sign of being Christ’s followers, by loving each other even as he has loved us. I say this should be done publicly so as to make our repudiation of our sectarianism and our resolution to follow the ways of peace as broad as our divisions, which have been strewn across the entire spectrum of our presence as a church.

In this installment I want to add that our salvation as a responsible people of God depends on our recovering our heritage as a unity movement among the church at large, a concept that we have well nigh lost sight of. We must rediscover our roots, the implications of which would be a rude awakening to many of our people who don’t know who they are, where they came from, or where they are going. We are by and large a cut-flower people, alienated from our past and separated from our history. We are probably as ahistorical or history-less as any denomination that could be named. For our recent leadership to tell us that we are the true, restored church of the New Testament, and that the intervening 2,000 years of history doesn’t matter, is a cruel rip-off.

We must first of all recapture the values of our heritage in the Stone-Campbell Movement in the simplest ways, such as reviving the mottoes and axioms of our pioneers, and coming to see what they meant by them. They were able to pack great truths in small capsules and thus fire the imagination of the people. The first lesson we need to learn about the old mottoes is that they had mostly to do with unity, such as “In matters of faith, unity; in matters of opinion, liberty; in all things, love.” The mottoes help us to see that our forebears had a passion for unity and that the movement they launched was an effort to unite the Christians in all the sects.

To introduce you to other mottoes I will escort you on a visit to the Disciples of Christ Historical Society in Nashville, which was created two generations ago to serve Churches of Christ as well as Christian Churches and Disciples of Christ by keeping them in touch with their history. We have been negligent in drawing upon the rich resources of this depository of our heritage. We can correct this in part by the visit that we now begin.

We pause in the courtyard in front of this beautiful Gothic library to study the cenotaph that stands as a memorial to the four leading pioneers of our Movement: Thomas and Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, and Walter Scott. A cenotaph is a memorial honoring a person who is buried elsewhere, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument in the District of Columbia. The “tombs” honor these national heroes, but they are buried elsewhere. The cenotaph honoring our pioneers has their likenesses engraved in stone. Under each likeness there is cut in stone a motto or slogan that epitomizes what his ministry was about. We will study two of these.

Below the stem likeness of Thomas Campbell is the most quoted line in our history outside the Bible itself: “The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.” This is taken from his Declaration and Address, the most famous document of our heritage, being an angry denunciation of division among Christians and a call for the unity of all God’s people. Campbell wrote those words in 1809, two years before he started his first congregation known as a “Church of Christ.” And yet he wrote of “the Church of Christ upon earth” as if it already existed. This shows that he had no such mentality that Christ’s church did not even exist and that he was about to “restore” it according to some recognizable New Testament pattern.

Campbell believed that the church of Jesus Christ not only then existed but that “the gates of hades” had not prevailed against it since the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit breathed it into existence. It was nonetheless in need of renewal or reformation, and that was his mission, especially in terms of restoring love, unity, and fellowship to the church now tragically tom asunder by partyism.

In this insightful statement, capsuled in a single line, Thomas Campbell bequeaths to us the one important truth about the church that we must recapture in our time if we are to find our roots: The Body of Christ upon earth has existed all through the centuries and it has always by its very nature been one. Along with Campbell and the apostle Paul we must ask ourselves, “Is Christ divided?” We can’t unite the Church of Jesus Christ. It is already one—essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally. This is because the church’s unity is a gift of the Holy Spirit to be received.

The church’s unity is real but not realized, something like a marriage in trouble. Schisms have imposed themselves upon that unity and obscured it. This is how Campbell viewed his mission, to discover principles of unity and fellowship whereby the church’s essential oneness could be realized. It is noteworthy that the passage of Scripture he turned to again and again in his famous document was Ro. 15:7: “Receive one another, even as Christ has received you, to the glory of God.”

That verse set the tone for much of what he had to say. Since we were not perfect when Christ received us, and we certainly were not right about everything, we should receive our sisters and brothers on the same basis. We do not have to see everything alike to be united, for oneness and sameness are not identical. And when we accept each other on the grounds that Christ accepts us it will not be to our own glory, as is the case with partyism, but to the glory of God. We don’t need to know much more about unity than that!

Under the engraved likeness of Barton Stone on that cenotaph is his pungent slogan “Let the unity of Christians be our polar star,” which is a remarkable take of the Lord’s prayer for unity in Jn. 17. Stone understood Jesus to say that only a united church could win a lost world, so unity is essential to the church’s mission. The polar star (unity) guides the old ship (the church) on its mission (evangelization of the world). When we keep our eye on the polar star by being a loving and united people we will really be God’s redeeming community in the world.

A heartfelt recovery of Stone’s slogan with all its implication would turn the Churches of Christ in a different direction. Presently we have no conception of ourselves as a unity people. How can we be when we never associate with other churches in any kind of cooperative effort? We can’t so much as join with other churches in an Easter or Thanksgiving program. We have been conned into believing that if we associate with other Christians and other churches that we thereby approve or endorse everything they believe and practice. But that is precisely the point of being united in Christ: We can be one without being the same; we can love and accept without approving and endorsing.

So, the cenotaph in Nashville witnesses to our heritage as a unity movement. Let Christian unity be our polar star. The Church of Christ upon earth is one. These are dynamic concepts. If we recover these slogans they will help us to think unity rather than division, and they will lead us to pray more for unity, something that we hardly ever do in our assemblies.

We will not have time for an extended visit in the library and archives. Enough to say that the building houses over 100,000 books, pamphlets, papers, letters about our history. They are about a unity movement that God called into existence in this country almost 200 year ago that we in Churches of Christ are supposed to be a part of. I could take you to numerous books and journals in that library that would confirm that fact. I will give but two examples. Dr. Robert Richardson, Alexander Campbell’s longtime associate and personal physician, was, according to Campbell himself, the best interpreter of what the movement was all about. I could show you where he wrote in Campbell’s paper, the Millennial Harbinger, that “This movement was born with a passion for unity, and unity has been its engrossing theme.”

The other example would be William Robinson, a British leader of the movement, whose What the Churches of Christ Stand For is respected as one of the best statements of what we are supposed to be as a people. In that book, written in 1959, he lists the six significant contributions to the church at large coming out of the Church of Christ heritage. After naming the place we have given to the Bible, the centrality of Christ, the divine nature of the church, baptism and weekly communion, and an aversion to man-made creeds, he lists “an undying passion it has witnessed to the unity of Christ’s church.” He says, like Richardson, that it started with a passion for Christian unity, and he added, speaking for the British Churches of Christ, “The passion for Christian unity has never been lost.”

A passion for Christian unity! Is that where we are in Churches of Christ today? That is where we must come to if we are to be saved.—the Editor

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Courage consists, not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing and conquering it.—Jean Paul Richter