Mark Love, Ph.D.
Rochester Christian University
Director of Graduate Program in Missional Leadership
Professor of Theology & Ministry
INTRODUCTION
From their inception until the present day, Churches of Christ have been a “people of the book.” Eschewing creeds and ecclesiastical structures above the congregation, the Churches of Christ have relied, at least in theory, on the sole authority of the Bible in matters of faith and doctrine. While the way the Bible is interpreted and used has changed over the last 200 years, the overall priority placed on the Bible has not. The Churches of Christ represent a wide spectrum of religious belief and practice, but the “through line” in our history is a high view of the Bible’s authority.
Growing up in Churches of Christ, I was peppered with sayings related to our reliance on scripture, and particularly the New Testament (and even more particularly, Acts-Epistles). “We speak where the Bible speaks and are silent where the Bible is silent.” “We have no creed but the Bible.” “Give me book, chapter, and verse.” “Do not go beyond what is written.” My Sunday school training included memorizing important verses, notably the “Great Commission” in Matthew 28:16-20, and Acts 2:38, passages that emphasized the importance of baptism. I remember in Vacation Bible School being taught that we were to be like the “noble Bereans” in Acts 17, who searched the scriptures for themselves to see if claims being made were found in scripture. We were and are, above all things, a people of the book.
My wife, Donna, grew up Catholic and has commented that her eventual participation with Churches of Christ was notable for the fact that members were encouraged to read their Bibles for themselves, something she had not received encouragement to do before. Colleagues at Rochester University have commented that their own denominations do not display the same commitment to the Bible as what they observe in the Church of Christ. I point this out, not to highlight any superiority, but only to say this feature of being a member of the Church of Christ is observable to non-members.
Like other Protestants, we have been committed to the notion of Sola Scriptura (scripture alone), but we took that commitment to extremes. Most Protestants accept some creed as authoritative, e.g. the Westminster Confession, the Apostles’ Creed, the Helvetic Confession, and so on. But creeds were rejected by early figures in the Stone-Campbell movement as human-constructed innovations that got in the way of going directly to the pure source, the Bible. While, like other Protestants, we tried to take the positive teachings of the Bible as a guide, even a blueprint, for Christian life, the church of my youth took the silence of scripture, not as freedom, but as prohibition. So, since musical instruments are not mentioned in the New Testament, (never mind the Old Testament, since that was no longer in force), we had no authorization to use them. We were not to go beyond what was written. This use of the silence of scripture, though inconsistently applied, explains many of the idiosyncratic practices of Churches of Christ. Though extreme in some ways, we were not, however, unique.
Nathan Hatch, in his book, The Bible in America, places early Stone-Campbell figures like Elias Smith and Alexander Campbell alongside notable American denominational leaders like Samuel Davies, the first president of Princeton, as promoting a democratization of faith in the heady aftermath of the American revolution. Old authorities had been thrown over in the pristine wilderness of America, allowing the individual to approach the Bible on his or her own terms. Unmoored from larger denominational commitments, novel ways of approaching faith and the Bible were numerous.
So, though we were not alone given the time-period during which the Stone-Campbell movement emerged, we were nevertheless adamant concerning the Bible’s singular authority. It is the golden thread that runs through the story of Churches of Christ: no creed but the Bible. Being a people of words on a page, however, also necessitates certain philosophical or hermeneutical commitments. How should we interpret this set of writings we hold dear? For the majority of our history, we have been characterized by what Amanda Pittman calls an “informational hermeneutic,” or an “intellectualist approach.” This approach tends to make the Bible a set of “facts to be believed, and commands to be obeyed.” The Bible becomes a handbook of sorts for good church order and daily living. This approach might even feel familiar to those who grew up in more conservative denominations. Reading the Bible this way, however, tends to rub out the rich diversity of scripture, in both genre and perspective, and it can lead to a variety of fundamentalisms.
It is precisely related to fundamentalism that the Church of Christ approach to scripture takes an interesting twist. Alexander Campbell is in many ways responsible for the early development of biblical hermeneutics in Churches of Christ. He championed an intellectualist, patternist approach to Bible reading. He did this, in part, because it conformed to the best science and philosophy of his day. He used the analytical philosophy of Thomas Reid, John Locke, and other empiricists, and combined their emphases with the leading science of his day, the Baconian Inductive Method, to develop an interpretative strategy designed to produce an unbiased reading of scripture. His stated aim was to “Open the New Testament as if mortal man had never seen it before.”
While now we see his approach as flawed, it nevertheless reveals Campbell as a man of letters, familiar with the philosophical currents of his age. Many Churches of Christ no longer read the Bible the way Campbell did. This is in part because biblical scholars have followed Campbell’s commitment to pursue the best scholarship of their day. Locke, Reid, and Bacon have been replaced by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Polanyi. A later essay will sketch the story of liberal learning within Church of Christ universities, but it is notable here that beginning in the mid 20th century a cadre of young Church of Christ scholars emerged from Ivy League and other highly regarded institutions. Lemoine and Jack Lewis, Everett Ferguson, Abraham Malherbe, Jim Roberts, Carl Holiday, John Willis, Neil Lightfoot, David Balch, and Tom Olbricht, to name some of the most notable, earned doctorates from Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, Union Seminary, and Duke. Most earned their doctoral degrees in biblical studies, not in theology or Christian history, underscoring the importance of the Bible in Churches of Christ, but also following Campbell’s openness to the best of contemporary learning.
Rochester University’s Bible and theology faculty reflects this same dynamic. Recent faculty have earned doctorates at Princeton, Emory, Notre Dame, Marquette, Aberdeen, and Luther Seminary. Though this is an impressive story of academic pedigree, it is offered here more as a way to situate Church of Christ scholarship in relation to other approaches to scripture. Simply put, the vast majority of men and women who train ministers in Church of Christ universities are not evangelicals and are certainly not fundamentalists. The old, Baconian-patternist approach to scripture has given way to other interpretative approaches. Philosophical hermeneutics casts doubt on the idea of a disinterested, or completely objective interpreter, so that it no longer makes sense to say, “We speak where the Bible speaks, and are silent where the Bible is silent.” Biblical theology has shown us the “echoes and illusions” of the Old Testament used by New Testament authors so that it is no longer possible to neatly divide the Bible into dispensations. Literary scholarship poses questions of genre and meaning in such a way that “patternist” readings no longer hold sway. This list of changes in biblical interpretation could be multiplied. I want to underscore, though, that Campbell’s commitment to the most learned approaches of the day continues, even as his particular way of interpreting the Bible has given way to other approaches.
There are, of course, congregations where a patternist hermeneutic can be found. “Preacher training” schools like Brown Trail or Bear Valley still follow the hermeneutical lead of early Restoration leaders. Also, many African American and Latinx leaders still read the Bible in similar ways. Even in these instances, however, the patternist approach to reading the Bible is shrinking, giving way to other approaches.
With this overly simplified sketch of biblical interpretation in place, I want to pursue two lines of inquiry. First, what difference does this make in how the Bible is read and understood among Bible and theology faculty in Church of Christ academic institutions? Second, how does this square with how the Bible is read or understood in Church of Christ congregations?
THE BIBLE IN THE ACADEMY
Richard Hughes, in his book, Reviving the Ancient Faith, notes that a dramatic hermeneutical shift began to occur among Churches of Christ in the 1980’s. Indeed, the shift was already well under way, but it emerged front and center as the primary issue that characterized deep fissures developing in Churches of Christ as a whole. The older patternist readings of the Bible were giving way first to critical, and later, to theological approaches to scripture. By critical approaches, I do not mean critical of the Bible, but critical in the way scientists use critical method to understand something, or the way we encourage students to use critical reasoning. With regard to the Bible, this includes a variety of approaches (text, literary, redaction, source, form, rhetorical) that attempt to understand scripture in its relationship to its original contexts. So, Genesis is read in light of other Ancient Near East texts that possess similar creation stories, the Pentateuch as a collection of sources developed over time, the Gospels as edited literary accounts of the life of Jesus, and so on.
The first wave of Church of Christ scholars to graduate from places like Harvard and Yale stayed mostly in the shallows of critical approaches to scripture, focusing more on text criticism (identity of the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts) and historical-grammatical exegesis (meaning of words and sentences in their historical context). This work was relatively safe, requiring no potentially controversial positions, and even lined up with our restorationist impulses to return to the original. These scholars, however, made it possible for successive generations to move more fully into the guilds of biblical scholarship.
The latter half of the 20th century saw significant and related changes in philosophy, science, and the interpretation of texts. In particular, the work of philosophers like Gadamer, Heidegger, Girard, Marion, and others challenged the “subject centered” notions of reality that imagined an individual, armed with critical methods, could master not only the world, but ancient texts as well. These philosophers taught that not only could perspective not be overcome by method, but perspectives, or fruitful prejudices to use Gadamer’s term, were actually necessary for understanding anything at all. The world of biblical interpretation shifted accordingly, away from “text scientists” dissecting ancient artifacts and toward interpreters who understood the lively nature of language and the generative value of perspectives, both theological and sociological. It makes a difference, in other words, if you are a Pentecostal reading from the margins in East Africa, or a Catholic, Latina immigrant teaching in Southern California, or a white male Presbyterian teaching at Princeton. One result of this swing toward perspective is how it now matters what an interpreter thinks about both God and the Bible as a sacred text as they interpret. While critical approaches could not be abandoned, (we have learned too much from them to leave them behind) they came to occupy a less significant place in the interpretation of the Bible. As a result of these shifts, theology became a more prominent interpretative consideration.
Scholars in Churches of Christ moved in sync with these shifts. Several books have explored these changes in biblical interpretation within our movement, notable among them are Tom Olbricht’s and John Mark Hicks’ autobiographical accounts of their developing perspectives. Neither Olbricht or Hicks are biblical scholars, which points to both the broadening of scholarship beyond biblical studies, and the importance of theological perspectives in considering hermeneutics. When I received my first graduate degree at Abilene Christian University in the 1980’s, we did not have a single faculty member who was trained in theology. Now, there are several. It is both a testament to the growth of theology in Church of Christ graduate schools and to our ongoing commitment to the Bible that a recent Yale-trained theologian now teaching at ACU published his first books, both highly regarded, on the doctrine of scripture.
This foray into developments in biblical interpretation over the last 100 years or so demonstrates a commitment to pursuing the most learned approaches to biblical interpretation by Church of Christ scholars. What remains of Campbell’s approach to the Bible is not his Baconian/patternist approach, but a commitment to interpreting scripture according to the best intellectual standards. In terms of biblical scholarship in Churches of Christ, this means our Bible and theology faculties do not have fundamentalist or even evangelical members. We have no historical stake in words like “inerrancy” or “infallibility.” We are not likely to teach Genesis 1-3 as a literal or historical account of creation or see a conflict between science and faith. We acknowledge both divine and human elements in the composing of the Bible. While the Bible reliably reveals God, it does so within the constraints of ancient cosmologies, approaches to history, and literary conventions. Church of Christ scholars acknowledge the rich diversity of scripture, even in its diversity of beliefs about God.
None of these orientations toward scripture should be seen as abandoning a high view of the Bible’s authority or a belief in scripture as inspired. To the contrary, these newer approaches arise out of a commitment to let the actual details of scripture define what it means to be inspired and authoritative, rather than imposing modern sensibilities on scripture that the Bible cannot sustain.
This often means, however, that the Bible and theology faculties in our universities are seen as more “progressive” theologically than the rest of the university, or even more so than the constituencies that make up the university’s support. Within the university, a tension often exists between the Bible and theology faculty, and student services, which has responsibility for the spiritual life of the campus. This tension should not be construed on either side as a devaluing of the Bible, or as a lack of commitment to theologically informed spirituality, but instead as a measurement of the gap between different ways of interpreting scripture and understanding faith.
THE BIBLE IN THE CONGREGATION
Let me turn attention now to the function of scripture in Church of Christ congregations. While few if any Bible professors are fundamentalists or evangelicals, the same cannot be said of church members. The historic commitment of Churches of Christ to the primacy of the Bible makes it easy for some to assume that positions like inerrancy and verbal inspiration are natural accomplices for staying true to the faith. Also, the loss of a hard sectarianism in Churches of Christ over the past 50+ years makes evangelical congregations seem more like faith partners than mainline congregations. As a result, Beth Moore and Bible Study Fellowship are influential in many of our churches and shape opinions of what the Bible is and what it does.
The rub here is less between university professors and congregations, and more between graduate trained ministers and their members. The expectation in many congregations, especially larger, urban/suburban ones, is that the lead minister would hold an advanced degree. Because of their training, ministers tend not to hold fundamentalist or evangelical positions related to the Bible. Members, as a result, tend to be more conservative than their preachers. While this can lead to conflict and minister burnout, this combination may work well for two reasons. First, Church of Christ preachers tend to preach biblical texts (as opposed to topics), and in doing so avoid hot button political issues that might be more characteristic of other groups. The performance of scripture in preaching lands right with Church of Christ congregants, and persuasion is possible when rhetoric is primarily biblical.
The second reason requires some explanation, but I would suggest that it works in our congregations because our graduate-trained ministers take a more postliberal or post-critical approach to the Bible. Let me explain. After the fundamentalist/modernist controversies of the early 20th century, there were basically two options regarding the interpretation of scripture: literalist (conservative/fundamentalist) or higher critical (liberal). As mentioned earlier, Churches of Christ had a foot in both worlds, holding conservative positions while being trained in mainline seminaries. In the back half of the 20th century, however, scholars like George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, Brevard Childs, Ellen Davis, Walter Bruggemann, Richard Hays, and many others, revealed both the limitations of this conservative/liberal binary and carved out options in the broad center. This movement could be characterized in many ways, and there is no single “middle” option. At the risk of oversimplification, though, one way of characterizing the shift is from historical to rhetorical. Both liberals and fundamentalists were interested in history, or what actually happened. Liberals, like those in the Jesus Seminar, “demythologized” the Bible to arrive at a plausible account of events—what Jesus actually did and said—whereas fundamentalists accepted everything as literal, historical fact. They were, as Nancey Murphy points out, two sides of the same modernist coin.
Postliberal, or post-critical scholars are less interested in history and more interested in how the texts themselves are functioning (rhetoric). Put another way, they are less interested in the world that produced the text and more interested in the world the text would produce. Postliberals play the text “where it lies,” honoring the language and arrangement of the text as irreplaceable. To use Linbeck’s term, the text comprises a unique “cultural-linguistic” reality that cannot be substituted simply with contemporary terms or concepts. Preachers following this postliberal approach, therefore, are not so much concerned with explaining the text, as they are with allowing it to perform. These sermons tend to be very “biblical,” using the actual language of the text, satisfying the Bible forward sensibilities of those in the pew.
As an aside, performance of the text is the kind of preaching I endeavor to do. One astute comment made by a more conservative member I received was, “I don’t have a single problem with anything you’re saying. It’s what you’re not saying that troubles me.” It occurs to me that this might be a potential problem with a Christian university hoping to avoid right leaning Christian politics while avoiding the pejorative label of “liberal.” It might be what we don’t say that raises suspicions.
CONCLUSION
In summary, my argument is that the Churches of Christ have always been and always will be a movement centered in interpretation of the Bible, even to the exclusion of other Christian norms such as creeds or theological traditions. Campbell’s twin commitments of having “no creed but the Bible,” and using the best learning of his day to interpret scripture are still honored, particularly by biblical scholars in our universities. While interpretation has moved away from the patternist hermeneutics of Campbell and other early leaders, his commitment to applying the best learning of his day remains. Newer hermeneutical approaches carry with them possible conflicts within both universities and churches but can be ameliorated by approaches to the Bible that are more postliberal or post-critical. Rochester University’s own story with the Bible is representative of these directions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, C. Leonard. “Baconianism and the Bible in the Disciples of Christ: J.S. Lamar and ‘The Organon of Scripture,’” Church History. Jan. 1986: 65–82.
Brueggemann, Walter. Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.
Campbell, Alexander. The Christian Baptist, III: 229.
East, Brad. The Doctrine of Scripture. Eugene, OR: Cascade Press, 2021.
East, Brad. The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1975.
Hatch, Nathan “Sola Scriptura and Novus Ordo Seclorum,” The Bible in America, Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, eds. New York: Oxford Press, 1982: 59-78.
Hicks, John Mark. Searching for the Pattern: My Journey in Interpreting the Bible. Self-published, 2019.
Hughes, Richard. Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, 25th Anniversary Addition (Philadelphia: Westminster/JohnKnox Press, 2009).
Love, Mark. “Reading the Bible on Its Own Terms,” Teleios Journal, 2 no 2, Summer, 2022: 73-81.
Murphey, Nancy. Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda. Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1996.
Olbricht, Thomas. Hearing God’s Voice. Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1996.
Pittman, Amanda. “Storying the World: Proposals for a Formative Reading of Biblical Narratives,” Restoration Quarterly, 64 no 3, 2022: 129.
Robinson, Edward J. Hard Fighting Soldiers: A History of African American Churches of Christ Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019.
Wells, Adam. “Biblical Criticism and the Phenomenology Scripture,”Phenomenologies of Scripture, ebook. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017: Loc 63-482.
