Christian Unity

Both as individuals and as congregations, Christians must give each other the freedom to learn and to grow.

In Thomas Campbell’s twelfth proposition, he laid out what he believed to be the way “to the highest state of perfection and purity of the church upon earth.” To Campbell the way seemed simple: accept everyone who meets the biblical requirements for conversion, and who continue to show evidence of their conversion commitment; and lead the church exactly according to the teachings and pattern of the New Testament church. The fallacy implicit in that approach is the assumption that sincere people under the lordship of Jesus would actually come to agreement upon every detail of that teaching and pattern. The impact of that fallacy is painfully evident in the divided church today.

It is evident that Christian unity will not be attained by calling all believers to immediate and perfect agreement on all subjects. Instead, the path to unity must accommodate sincere differences of understanding. These differences must be explicitly permitted and protected, rather than being rejected and purged. The path to truth is not a straight line. Not all people travel at the same rate, and not all learn truths in the same sequence. The church must be a safe place for a person to change his or her mind, and perhaps to change it back again. Without that safety, real search for truth does not occur. Instead, people seek to comply with the norms of the group, whether those norms are true or not. Errors of the group go unchallenged and even unexamined. Both the truths and the errors of the group become calcified. Real learning is blocked, and unity is thwarted. Instead, factions form, drawing battle lines over every difference.

So, here is the seventh proposal for unity:

Proposal #7: Both as individuals and as congregations, Christians must give each other the freedom to learn and to grow. It is the duty of church leaders to make the local congregation a safe place for people to grow in their understanding truth, recognizing that this growth does not always occur at a steady pace, nor always in a straight line. Likewise, relationships between congregations must accommodate differences in understanding as each community matures in its knowledge of the Word. Only those understandings that are essential to conversion may be held as prerequisites for Christian fellowship.

All who have been adopted as sons of God through faith are obligated to accept one another as brothers.

In his ninth proposition, Thomas Campbell called on all Christians to accept one another “as brethren, children of the same family and father, temples of the same spirit, members of the same body, subjects of the same grace, objects of the same divine love, bought with the same price, and joint heirs of the same inheritance. Whom God hath thus joined together no man should dare to put asunder.“

When we fail to accept those whom God accepts, we are dividing the family of God. As Campbell stated in his tenth proposition, division in the church is a direct violation of the Lord’s express command. Paul wrote to the Galatians that those who practice dissension and factions will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

Why, then, is the church characterized by division rather than unity? Campbell, in his eleventh proposition, pointed to two causes. First, he said that divisions are caused by people neglecting parts of the revealed will of God. Second, he pointed to divisions caused by people making their opinions and inventions as terms of fellowship. The difficulty with Campbell’s explanation has become evident in the subsequent two hundred years. Men have not been able to agree on what is an opinion or invention, and what is the revealed will of God. Those disagreements have formed the basis for more divisions than the actual issues that Campbell described.

Perhaps there is a better way to look at division in the church. There are two kinds of division: that which is authorized by scripture, and that which is not. The former divisions are not really divisions within the church, but divisions between the church and that which is not the church. The latter division are not only unauthorized, but contrary to the explicitly revealed will of God. These unauthorized divisions arise because of the deceived, proud and self centered nature of fallen man. They are the work of Satan, and they obstruct the mission of the church to the lost world.

So, here is the sixth proposal for unity:

Proposal #6: All who have been adopted as sons of God through faith are obligated to accept one another as brothers. Failure to accept those whom God has accepted is a violation of a direct command of God. Therefore, no division may take place without explicit authorization from the scriptures. No division may occur based on an inference from scripture.

The affairs of the Christian church are to be governed by the New Testament, with recognition being given to the fallibility of our understanding.

Thomas Campbell addressed this issue in his sixth, seventh, and eighth propositions

The scriptures teach in several ways: direct commands, approved examples, clearly stated principles, and implied principles. Our understanding of these teachings is affected by our fallible reasoning, our pre-existing misconceptions, our incomplete background knowledge, and sometimes by our past experiences and motives (consciously or unconsciously). While the scriptures themselves are infallible, our understanding of the scriptures is subject to error. No human is immune to these kinds of error. Those who believe they are immune may actually be the most susceptible.

No inferred principles of scripture can be bound upon an individual Christian who has not yet perceived and understood those principles for themselves. Otherwise, that Christian is being called to place his faith in the wisdom and truthfulness of man rather than God. Each Christian must keep his own conscience clear (Rom 14:23), and each will appear before God to give an account (Rom 14:10-12).

Some teachings are more clear and obvious than others. The clearest teachings carry the most obvious authority for the church. Those teachings that are more difficult to understand, or are less clear, or are understood with less certainty, should be approached with a corresponding degree of grace, mercy, and humility. We should never forget that our understanding is subject to error.

Certain teachings may seem clear to one honest, God-fearing person but unclear or even incorrect to another honest, God-fearing person. Inferred principles are inherently less clear than directly stated commands and principles. To assess the clarity of a teaching, do not merely think of how clear it seems to you. Also consider at how clear the teaching is to others. How has the teaching been regarded by various church leaders in the past? Do respected people in the past, or today, have different views on the teaching? If so, perhaps it is not such a clear teaching after all. Remember that no lines of fellowship may be drawn based on disputable matters (Rom 14:1).

So, here is proposal #5:

Proposal #5: The New Testament is the sole source of authority for the Christian church. Recognition must be given to the fallibility of our understanding as we apply the authority of the scriptures. So nothing may be bound on an individual Christian which they have not understood for themselves from the scriptures. And no disputable matter may be made a test of fellowship.

The only source of divine authority available to the church today is the scriptures. Topics on which the scriptures are silent are inherently disputable matters, since there is no final word from the Lord to settle a dispute on these topics. Therefore no authority can be inferred from the silence of the scriptures.

Thomas Campbell’s fifth proposition addressed the silence of the scriptures. He held that no mortal man is authorized to make rules or to implement requirements in the church which are not found in the scriptures. Further, he insisted that nothing should be accepted into the practice of the church “that is not as old as the New Testament.”

That last part is where the greatest difficulties arise. In effect, he was saying that scriptural authorization is required for every single thing done in the church. Where the scriptures are silent, therefore, the church would be prohibited from acting.

I have written previously here and here and here about the silence of the scriptures. I will not rehash that ground here. Instead, I want to take a historical look at the doctrine of silence.

The notion that silence prohibits did not originate with Campbell. At least as far back as Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531), in the Swiss Reformation, the prohibitive nature of silence was a fundamental tenet. In contrast to Martin Luther, Zwingli believed that not only the faith but also the practice of the church had become corrupt, and therefore need to be restored. Luther focused on the spiritual realm, particularly on the process for receiving forgiveness of sins. So Luther made relatively few reforms in the outward practices of public worship. Zwingli, on the other hand, removed the statues, relics, pictures, altar equipment, priestly vestments, and audible music (both instrumental and vocal) from the church. He held that Christians were to make melody “in their hearts” and not their mouths. (Discovering Our Roots — The Ancestry of the Churches of Christ, p. 27)

However, Zwingli stopped short on one topic: infant baptism. The relationship between church and state brought with it a relationship between citizenship and church membership, which made it difficult to postpone church membership waiting for an adult believer’s decision. But the Anabaptists, who lacked the state’s sanction, had no conflict of interest on the subject, and challenged Zwingli on his inconsistency. These Anabaptists held an even more fervent commitment to the prohibitive nature of silence, and soon brought their views into America, becoming the Amish and Mennonite churches.

The Puritans found their way into America in the 1600’s, bringing with them their belief in the prohibitive nature of the silence of the scriptures. Here they sought to coerce Baptists, Quakers, and others to conform to Puritan doctrine, by methods including imprisonment and public whippings. These are the same Puritans who, before the end of the century, executed twenty people and imprisoned nearly 200 in the Salem witch trials.

The Baptists emerged from English Puritanism in the early 1600’s, with similar views on silence. They brought those views to America. One important branch of this movement was known as the Separatist Baptists. They sought to restore the New Testament pattern in their worship. They held to

“nine Christian rites”: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the love feast, the kiss of charity, anointing the sick, laying on of hands, dedicating of children, and the right hand of fellowship. They also appointed elders, deacons, and deaconesses, believing these offices to have precedents in the New Testament. Their writings were filled with appeals to scriptural “precedent” and to the “primitive Christians.” One writer claimed that, upon examination, people would find the Baptist Church “exactly corresponds with the rule and line of the Gospel in every part of it.” (Discovering Our Roots — The Ancestry of the Churches of Christ, p. 67-68).

These Separatist Baptists rejected all creeds, claiming to follow the Bible “without note or comment.”

The Stone-Campbell movement emerged from the same communities where these Separatist Baptists had taught for generations. Many of those early converts came from a Separatist Baptist background. The strong views in the churches of Christ on the silence of the scriptures can be traced through these separatist Baptists, through the Puritans, all the way back to Huldreich Zwingli. Along the way, hundreds if not thousands of well educated, zealous and sincere men have been imprisoned, tortured and burned at the stake rather than renounce their conclusions drawn from the silence of the scriptures. Indeed, these were true believers.

So what is the point of all this historical review? Simply that all these devoted men, who proved that they loved God more than life itself, could not agree on their interpretations of scripture. Zwingli, the Puritans, the Anabaptists, and the Separatist Baptists all came to different conclusions based on the silence of the scriptures. Collectively, they demonstrated that the doctrine that prohibits based on the silence of the scriptures leads to division and strife.

Of all people alive today, surely the churches of Christ ought to understand this point. Has any group in history divided more often, over more doctrinal controversies, with more acrimony, than the churches of Christ? Can this possibly be what Jesus had in mind when he prayed for our unity? Does the world really believe God sent Jesus, because they see our unity? Do they recognize us as disciples of Jesus, by our love for one another?

Five hundred years of history has proven that the doctrine of prohibitive silence is divisive. No wonder the inspired scriptures command us not to pass judgment on disputable matters!

Any proposal for unity among Christians must address a topic that has led to so much division in the past. So here is Proposal #4:

Proposal #4: Topics on which the scriptures are silent are inherently disputable matters. Therefore authority cannot reliably be inferred from the silence of the scriptures. So we must not draw lines of fellowship over such matters, and we must not quarrel over these topics. Instead, “whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves.” (Rom 14:22)

Nothing is required in order to be a Christian that is not explicitly made a condition of salvation in the scriptures.

In Thomas Campbell’s third and fourth propositions, he called all believers in Christ to come together on the standard of the New Testament scriptures. According to Campbell, nothing can be required of a Christian that is not “expressly enjoined upon” the New Testament church in the scriptures, “either in express terms, or by approved precedent.” The fourth proposition in particular limits the application to the New Testament scriptures only.

Certainly, given the absence of modern day revelations directly from God, we must go back to the inspired writings of the past in order to get divinely authoritative instructions. No human wisdom can replace or add to what God has revealed to man. We must go to the scriptures for answers. When the answer is not provided in scripture, we must find a way to be content with not knowing the answer.

One aspect of the third proposition is troublesome. Nearly two hundred years of painful experience should have taught us to be wary of binding approved precedents. Literally, all an approved precedent tells us is that a certain thing done in the past was approved at the time. It does not tell us whether or not alternative practices might also have been approved in the past, or might be approved in the present. One might decide, as an exercise of human wisdom, to limit one’s own practice to those things that are known to have been approved in the first century church. That seems like a safe and conservative approach. But there is no New Testament teaching that requires that approach. We have no clear biblical authority to bind that approach on anyone else.

The New Testament gives many examples of Christians who varied widely in the completeness and accuracy of their understanding. There were Christians who thought Gentiles had to be circumcised to be saved. There were Christians who thought eating meat was sin. There were others who felt obligated to observe special days. There were divisions over preachers. There was competition over spiritual gifts. Some who ought to have been teachers were not even sound in their understanding of the first principles. While all of these were given correction and were urged to move on to maturity, they were still regarded as brothers. In like manner, we must accept as brothers all who have been adopted as sons of God, despite their deficient understanding, even if they have been in the Lord long enough that they should know better.

Salvation is conditional. But we are not at liberty to define the conditions. Where God has drawn a clear and specific line, we can and must speak with corresponding confidence and clarity. Where the line in scripture is less clear or less specifically defined, we must be honest enough to admit that degree of uncertainty. It is not our prerogative to clarify what God has not clearly revealed.

Salvation is one of the most basic principles in the scriptures. God wants everyone to be saved, and has placed salvation within the grasp of even the most simple-minded person. The conditions of salvation are accessible, simple, and clearly defined in scripture. Everyone who meets those basic conditions is a child of God and a member of the church.

So, the third proposal:

Proposal #3: Nothing is required for membership in the Christian church which is not explicitly made a condition of salvation in the scriptures.