C. Kutz-Marks
Greater Austin Area Stone-Campbell Unity Breakfast
Dec. 6, 2008
Almost exactly 5 years ago now, as my then 19 yr. old son David and I were traveling through the United Kingdom, we arrived late one evening in Glasgow, Scotland – and were fortunate to find an available Bed and Breakfast there- in this special place where I anticipated experiencing the finest highlight of our trip.
Though I was still battling the fever and weakness that accompanied the lung infection I was being treated for, my excitement was growing because …I knew that we were getting close to where both Thomas and Alexander Campbell had been educated...two of the men who were at the forefront of the development of our common tradition.
Early the next morning while David was still sleeping I slipped out of our room, got a hasty breakfast and walked, what turned out to be a very short distance, to the University of Glasgow. As I approached the old regal buildings I could imagine Thomas and Alexander coming across the Irish Sea from their home in a County Court, Ireland to this incredible university atmosphere in order to get their education. There I took dozens and dozens of photographs of the major buildings of the University, looking at the architecture and the fine cut of the enormous windows, the soaring spires, the stable foundation stones. In those moments I was reveling, seeing with my own eyes what I envisioned Thomas and Alexander would have seen nearly 200 years ago, drinking in the place where a fine theological education opened their minds, changed their thinking, their lives… and later my life and yours as well.
If I’d returned to the bed and breakfast right then, like I had a mind to do, this story would have had a very different ending.
Instead, as the University was just beginning the unlocking its doors for the morning, I decided to stay a little longer, look a bit deeper, and found a disturbing brochure at the admissions desk that told me that these is glorious building I had been admiring and loving, imagining to be so significant in our history, turned out to be buildings that neither Thomas nor Alexander Campbell ever even saw when they attended the university there in the early 1800's. The building I was in was not even constructed until 1878! It turns out that the buildings of the time they attended the university had been built on lowlands of the city down near the river. The land there was marshy and bad for their health. When disease and unsanitary conditions progressively worsened, the University trustees decided to abandon the lowland property for a school higher up on the Hill. I was crushed to learn that all that still existed from that original school that the Campbells had attended was about an 80ft. span of one tottering brick wall… which I would hunt down to my great disappointment later that day. The site was abandoned, overgrown, a blight.
A few minutes later when the library opened I went looking for some of the memorabilia from the Campbells. The librarian did not know a thing about anyone named Alexander Campbell. Thomas Campbell, she knew about Thomas Campbell. But when she started sharing some of her information it was clear that she was not talking about our Thomas Campbell, co-founder of the first powerful movement towards Christian unity on American soil. She was talking about Thomas Campbell the great Scottish poet of whom a statue still stands on the central square of Glasgow!
It didn’t get any better. Nobody I spoke with on that day in Glasgow had any idea about the identities of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. As the religious history of Scotland and all the Britain would unfold, from the Campbells' day to our own, many have been so riveted to their narrow little brand of Christian faith, that the whole notion of an ecumenical Christian faith such as the Campbells promoted, an open Christian faith, a broadly accepting Christian faith… could find no purchase in Europe.
The reason I share this experience with you this morning is because my disillusionment in Glasgow is mirrored in a similar disillusionment that our Disciples of Christ branch of the forbearers in faith here in America experienced in the late 1800's and early 1900's.
You see, these Disciples of Christ scholars had read the scriptures carefully, in the Book of Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament, and expected that in those days in the early Christian church Christians had been unified, loving and caring, well-organized, and more or less of one mind about the nature of the faith that they professed. i
They found in the scriptures a picture of True Christian Community. ii And they were committed to restoring that in their own churches on the American frontier. Restoring the glorious harmony the earliest Christian church, the Restoration Principle, became a prime element of the message.iii
Now, if they had just walked away from further study, if they had closed their books and their minds at this point, there would have been considerably less pain and less struggle in the spiritual life of Disciples of Christ.
At this point in our story, a poster on a campus ministries office wall in the 1970’s comes to mind. It shows a picture of an old fashioned wringer washing machine and a rag doll beside it that has been pressed nearly flat. It quotes Jesus’ words from John 8:31, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." Well this poster said, “The truth will make you free, but first it’ll put you through the wringer.”
And our Disciples forbearers, especially our lead scholars- in the late 1800’s went through a theological wringer, alright. They discovered as they opened their ears and eyes to the discoveries of higher biblical criticism,iva careful and scholarly study of the texts, highly influenced by Enlightenment notions –as it was being propounded in the universities of Europe and quite a bit later in the universities of America, using various new techniques of study that would come to be known as Literary Criticism, Redaction Criticism, Textual Criticism, Tradition Criticism, Form Criticism, Canonical Criticism…. what they discovered was that the unity and simplicity and harmony of life that they had believed existed in the early Christian church, most likely really never did exist at all.
In the same way that the University I had expected to be the Campbells' university didn't exist anymore, our Disciples forbearers reluctantly came to the conclusion that one of the great pillars of the early movement in the early 1800's, wasn't there either.
What these new biblical study tools uncovered was that instead, the early church was a patchwork of beliefs, styles of organization, and perspectives. When these intellectual leaders resisted the tendency to turn back a previous way of seeing the Bible, when they continued to embrace this higher biblical criticism they inevitably had to give up Restorationism as one of our key Disciples of Christ identity bases. This was a fateful decision, a decision that to this very day affects the way that Disciples think, the way that Christian Education is done in Disciples churches, and maybe most clearly, in what it is that Disciples of Christ seminarians studying for the ministry learn in our seminaries.
The real issue becomes how we're going to interpret the Bible. Unlike the early Stone/Campbell movement, most 21st century Disciples of Christ members cannot see the Bible as a simple blueprint for being church any more. In fact, early Stone/Campbell movements insistence that the Bible is straight-forward, understandable by any who will put their minds and spirits to the understanding of it, is also another casualty of the fateful decision to embrace Biblical criticism. Biblical study is vastly more complicated now, and like other complicated fields, professionals have arisen in it. Today it seems that only professional Biblical scholars alone can come close to a thorough understanding of the Bible.
That notwithstanding, we still remind our membership that it is, indeed, their responsibility as church members to “work out your own salvation in fear and trembling”v even though in lifetime of study they’ll never deeply understand the Bible and the history of our faith as they would wish. And as Jesus in the Gospel of John teaches, “the Truth will set you free” contemporary Disciples of Christ will in essence add the poster’s message, “but first it will put you through the wringer.”
In Bible studies in our congregations, Disciples of Christ ministers commonly experience that their sharing of some important insights from their seminary education with a jaw-drop response from study members, who then say often with some anger in the voice, “if you knew this all this time since your seminary days, why have you not told us this earlier?”
And the truest answer in most circumstances is that the pastor has been weighing what the church member or the whole church can bear, because what the higher criticism is in essence, is the possibility of blowing someone’s faith out the water, or the possibility of miracle healing of an ailing faithfulness, depending on the readiness of the hearer.
As a denomination, we are only just now beginning to our heads around the very real challenges. We are good at teaching the basics of the faith and the Bible. There is a solid foundation built in one who is brought up and active in a Disciples congregation. We know how to teach Bible stories in ways that can be remembered. Let’s call this first , naïve stage the pre-critical stage of spiritual development.
And over the last half-century we’ve gotten much better at posing faith challenging questions in high school & college age ministries, that draw out from within them the tension they might have felt but not dealt with when, as just one example, they hear of the two stories of God’s creating the earth in Genesis 1 & 2 when in church, but get a thoroughly scientific explanation of creation through evolution over a vastly different time scale, without need of God, when at school. We Disciples are getting somewhat better at raising up members who can both understand and also express to others a more sophisticated relationship of science and religion, natural law and miracle. Some of our people are now reading deeply profound theological works on their own that are quite challenging, in order to faithfully “work out their salvation…”on an intellectual level.
But we only rarely get beyond this stage, I am sorry to say. Our finest teachers and models of the Christian faith become such because they make one further quantum jump in their spiritual development. These models of Disciples faith, not only experience their naïve faith; not only had that faith challenged by the world, by science, by personal experience, by encounters with others of different faith, and made it through to a new synthesis; but have entered into the a state that the Philosopher Paul Ricouer called, “a second naivete,” a new way of relating through the Bible, through Christian worship and service, through personal and sometimes mystical encounters with the Spirit of God, what I can only call True Freedom.
This third phase is no longer captive to Biblical literalism, nor is it captive to the questioning spirit that I confess, is so strong in the minds and spirits of many Disciples of Christ members. Those in this 3rd stage have, to use the metaphor of Barton Stone, fallen head over heels in love with God. They become so enthralled with the actual reality of their relationship with God, that there is no gravity left from those earlier stages.
And if Disciples of Christ have all too often been broken on the rock of scientism in a noble search for integrity, for Truth, we have also been given these Free Ones, even in the 21st century, to challenge us to get up and to be about the healing work of God’s Spirit, never more needed than today.
i Thomas Campbell wrote in The Declaration and Address:
“all such things, by simply returning to the original standard of
christianity--the profession and practice of the primitive church,
as expressly exhibited upon the sacred page of New Testament
scripture, is the only possible way, that we can perceive, to get rid
of those evils. And we humbly think that a uniform agreement in
that for the preservation of charity would be infinitely preferable to
our contentions and divisions: nay, that such a uniformity is the
very thing that the Lord requires, if the New Testament be a
perfect model--a sufficient formula for the worship discipline and
government of the christian church. Let us do, as we are there
expressly told they did, say as they said: that is, profess and prac-
tise as therein expressly enjoined by precept and precedent, in
every possible instance, after their approved example; and in so
doing we shall realize, and exhibit, all that unity and uniformity,
that the primitive church possessed, or that the law of Christ re-
quires.”
ii As Mark Toulouse notes in Joined in Discipleship: the Maturing of an American Religious Movement, 1992, Chalice Press, p. 68, “Disciples of the nineteenth century believed that all local gatherings of Christians in the first and second centuries were perfectly unified in all essential matters of faith and organization. This presupposition was central to the clearly Disciples commitment to the restorationism.”
And then on p. 69 “The context provided by higher criticism challenged all these earlier affirmations. Beginning with their renewed theological understanding of the church as an organization which, try as it may, can never escape its historical relativity. Disciples have concluded that the church has never seen a golden age when it was pure and without blemish. Though inspired and driven by a sincere commitment to divine purposes in history, the church can never completely escape either its historical existence (and, therefore, its relative and finite existence in history) or its humanity (and, therefore, its sinfulness).
Historical research over the last century has collaborated what the increased theological sensitivity of Disciples has concluded about the nature of the church. Disciples, and other mainline Protestants, now know that the early church only gradually developed in its self-understanding. Jewish, Greek, and Roman elements all combined to affect its development as an institution, both in its structure and in its thought. History has revealed very clearly the fact of diversity in the early church. There never was one ancient church, but instead, an assortment of early churches. The practices, church government, and, yes, even the faith of these early congregations were quite diverse depending on geographical location and cultural influences. For example, the congregation in Antioch differed considerably from the congregation in Jerusalem. Even as these two fellowships undoubtedly shared a common love for Christ, they defined the nature of the Christian life, for the individual and for the church, quite differently (refer to Acts 15, for example). In other words, there really never existed some singular unified early church Disciples could restore in the modern period.”
iii Ibid. Toulouse’s work is not only central in the focus of this sermon, but of each of the following two in this sermon series. His evaluation of the major principles of the Disciples mindset is widely regarded as accurate, in my experience.
iv Fields of Literary Criticism, Redaction Criticism, Textual Criticism, Tradition Criticism, Form Criticism, Canonical Criticism all having bearing on these developments. See for example the summary treatments found in “Modern Biblical Interpretation” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 1993, Oxford Univ. Press.
v Phil. 2:12 “Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
No comments:
Post a Comment