We Must Abandon Claim to Exclusive Truth. . .

WHAT MUST THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
DO TO BE SAVED? (12)

There is a liberating truth that would go far in saving the Church of Christ from the obscurant course it has followed during the century of its existence: We can believe we are right without having to believe that everyone else is wrong. For one hundred years, ever since it was bequeathed to us by well-meaning but misguided leaders at Sand Creek, Illinois in 1889, the Church of Christ has been hamstrung by the fallacy that if we surrender our claim to exclusive truth we forfeit our right to exist. If we are right, everyone else has to be wrong. Not so. If we are true and faithful Christians, then no one else is. That does not follow. Our raison d’etre depends upon our being the one and only true church. Wrong again. We have been sold a bill of goods by those who would make us a fissiparous sect forever engaged in the “jarrings and janglings of sectarian strife,” to quote Thomas Campbell.

We must first of all realize that this claim to exclusive truth was not the position held by the pioneers of the Restoration Movement. They launched “a movement to unite the Christians in all the sects,” a goal that clearly implied that there were Christians in the sects. One of their mottoes was, “We are Christians only but not the only Christians.” It was never their claim that they were the only Christians, the only true church, and they were not exclusivists. Alexander Campbell left the Presbyterians and was “forced out” (as he saw it) by the Baptists, but he never broke fellowship with either and always considered them Christians. And in his famous Lunenburg Letter he said if there were no Christians in the sects there were none anywhere.

It is a little known fact that the first congregations of the Campbell movement, Brush Run and Wellsburg (both in Virginia near Bethany, Campbell’s home) were members of a Baptist association of churches, the first the Redstone association, the second the Mahoning association. A third congregation in Pittsburg, led by Thomas Campbell, sought membership in a Presbyterian presbytery and was turned down. Alexander Campbell frequently spoke for various denominations, and their clergy were often visitors in his home and spoke at the college he founded on his own farm. When he went to Nashville to oppose Jesse Ferguson, the Church of Christ minister who was conducting seances with the dead, he first spoke at the Methodist church where he was introduced by the bishop who offered support for the difficult task he had in their city.

All this stands in bold contrast to the Church of Christ today where a preacher. is suspect if he has any such contact with other believers. For example, Bill Banowsky, a prominent Church of Christ minister, has in recent years been guest speaker at various denominations. He told a class at the Highland Oaks Church of Christ in Dallas, in a splendid lesson on unity that I heard on tape, that he had been criticized more for his visits to other churches than anything else he had ever done, and he added that he had done a lot of shady things. When the elders of a church in south Texas heard that brother Banowsky had preached for a Methodist church, they cancelled the appointment he had at their church.

This is by no means atypical among Churches of Christ. All these years it has been an accepted fact that whatever cooperative effort the churches in a town may promote they cannot count on the Church of Christ helping out. It is rare for a Church of Christ minister to participate in the ministerial association, and if he takes part in a city-wide Easter or Thanksgiving service he does so at his own risk. A person may spend a lifetime in a Church of Christ without ever hearing anyone from any other church, and except for weddings and funerals never visit any other church. We have no fellowship with other churches and other Christians (period).

And yet we claim to be a unity-minded people and heirs of a unity movement. How can we have an effective unity plea when we have nothing to do with anyone else?

Not only is our exclusivism at odds with our own heritage in the Stone-Campbell movement, it is also contrary to the teaching of Christ, who was not an exclusivist. And he taught his disciples that they were not to be absolutists. Mark 9:38-40 tells how one of the disciples said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone who does not follow us casting out demons in Your name, and we forbade him because he does not follow us.” It was one of those things that pride often dictates—if someone is not “of us” he does not count. This was the ideal time for Jesus to call for a narrow view if such was his intention.

His response must have startled the disciples who by then supposed they had the exclusive claim to truth and the only ones qualified to teach it. “Do not forbid him,” Jesus told them “for no one who works a miracle in My name can soon afterward speak evil of Me.” He went on to speak a truth we are slow to learn: “He who is not against us is on our side.” We might be surprised how many there are that Jesus would accept as on his side.

It is one thing for us to believe in absolute truth, which we all do since we believe in God, but it is something much different for us to presume that we have an absolute understanding of that truth. Truth is absolute, our grasp of truth is relative. One sobering truth speaks to that: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). So, we can surrender our claim to exclusive truth (only we have all the truth) and still believe in absolute truth (which is a reality that is beyond our perfect understanding).

On the face of it, we are forced to conclude that we must abandon our claim to exclusive truth in order to be an authentic people. We have no right to exist believing that we and we only have the truth. We must admit that we are both fallible and finite, that we, like everyone else, are wrong about some things and ignorant about other things. We must include ourselves in Alexander Pope’s wise dictum: “To err is human, to forgive is divine.” The Bible mandates that we acknowledge our ignorance: “If anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know” (lCor.8:2). The next verse shows that what is really important is not whether we know God but whether he knows us!

And yet we can believe, in common with all Christians, that we have found many precious truths that we live for and would die for. It is not so much that we know certain truth, for “Knowledge puffs up while love builds up,” but that we believe that truth and act upon it in love. We are not saved by knowledge but by faith that works by love.

There are some compelling reasons why the Church of Christ must abandon its claim to exclusive truth:

l. Such a claim is seen by others as rude. arrogant, and self-righteous, and it hinders people from hearing us with an open mind.

Fair-minded people understandably resent those who believe they are right and everyone else is wrong. All through the years we have been accused of believing we are the only ones going to heaven, that we are the only Christians and the only true church. This is not only rude and arrogant but nonsense, for the Church of Christ, counting all its factions, comprise less than one-tenth of one percent of the hundreds of millions that make up the Christian world. Furthermore, such a view dechristianizes many of the noblest, most dedicated believers who have sacrificed for the cause of Christ more than ourselves.

2. Such a claim makes us look ridiculously inconsistent when we draw upon the labors of other Christians and yet say they are not Christians.

We sing the great hymns of Martin Luther (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”), John Henry Newman, who was a Roman Catholic bishop (“Lead, Kindly Light”), and Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism (“I know That My Redeemer Lives”). We use translations of the Bible produced through the centuries by the church at large. We study the commentaries and read the books of scholars that do not even know about the Church of Christ. We send our missionaries to the language schools of the various denominations and our college professors are educated at seminaries and universities of various churches. This is “taxation without salvation”!

3. Such a claim contradicts the Bible in that it implies that Christ had no church upon the earth and that there were no Christians during most of the past two thousand years.

It is disarming to our people when they realize that what they call “the Church of Christ” is only a century old, and the Restoration Movement out of which it emerged is only two centuries old. Our claim to exclusive truth cancels 1900 years of history: no church, no Christians! Not even William Tyndale who was burned at the stake in 1536 for translating the Bible into English. Our Lord made it clear that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church, and we know from history that his church has always been around, “living still in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.” This makes it clear that distinction must be made between “the Church of Christ upon earth” that Thomas Campbell talked about and the Yellow-Pages Church of Christ.

4. Such a claim makes separatists of the Church of Christ and makes it impossible for it to be part of a unity movement.

There is no way for us to make an effective plea for unity so long as we assume an exclusivistic posture. Other believers will ignore us so long as we refuse to have any fellowship with them. We can only preach conformity (“Be like us; we are the true church!”); we cannot plead for unity (“Let’s join hands and grow closer to Christ together!). And yet unity is our heritage. We must plead for unity in diversity, which is the only kind of unity there is, and for disagreement without division, which is the only way to “preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” which is a Biblical charge.

5. Such a claim stands on the false premise that there can be perfect knowledge and perfect obedience.

This has been our undoing in the Church of Christ. We have to be right about everything, with every i dotted and every t crossed. We have not come to terms with the grace of God. This is why we can never be sure of our salvation. We try and try harder, but we are never sure. Once we realize that acceptance with God is not a matter of our goodness or our works or our perfect knowledge and obedience, but a matter of surrendering to God’s grace, we will abandon our claim to exclusive truth.

The good news in all this is that there are many, perhaps a majority, in the Church of Christ that arc already abandoning our claim to exclusive truth. It is the leadership that is hesitant. A growing number are realizing that their raison d’etre does not depend upon the naive claim that we have a monopoly upon God’s truth.

We have impelling reasons to exist as the Church of Christ, the most significant being that ours is a unity heritage and we are to be busy promoting the cause of the unity of all believers. We are within the tradition of Barton W. Stone whose motto was, “Let Christian unity be our polar star.”

Along with being a unity movement, we exist in order to be a productive part of the Body of Christ, filled with the Spirit and bearing its fruit of love, joy, and peace. We exist in order to be an intelligent and responsible community of believers sensitive to the needs of a suffering world. We exist in order to become more and more like Christ by being a servant community. We exist in order to help redeem fallen humanity by being the salt of the earth and the light of the world. And always a pilgrim church, whose home is not in this world, that is living in time but for eternity.

All this is our raison d’etre and it is more meaningful when we see ourselves, not as a church that has exclusive truth, but as a people always in search of truth, especially as it is revealed in Jesus Christ. And always eager to accept other Christians as equals and join with them in the unending search for more and more truth.—the Editor