In his Rochester Retrospect* essay, Dr. Mark Love, RCU professor of theology and ministry and founder of 1528 Collaborative, explores how the Churches of Christ have approached the reading of scripture throughout the decades.
From their inception until the present day, Churches of Christ have been a “people of the book,” who rely on the sole authority of the Bible in matters of faith and doctrine, Love writes. The church has changed the way it interprets the Bible, but it still gives priority to scripture.
The Golden Thread: No Creed but the Bible
By rejecting creeds, as established by early figures in the Stone-Campbell movement, and sticking to the pure source of the Bible, the Churches of Christ were “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,” Love writes.
Alexander Campbell, one of the founders of the Stone-Campbell movement who was using the best learning of his day, championed an “intellectualist, patternist approach to Bible reading,” but now that approach has given way to more interpretative approaches.
Love writes that this approach originally made the Bible a set of “facts to be believed, and commands to be obeyed,” and says reading the Bible this way “tends to rub out the rich diversity of scripture, in both genre and perspective, and it can lead to a variety of fundamentalisms.”
In his essay, Love then explores how this change in understanding scripture affects both Church of Christ academic institutions and congregations.
The Bible in the Academy
In scholarly institutions, the older patternist readings of the Bible gave way first to critical, and later, to theological approaches to scripture. “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,” he writes.
Critical approaches have not been abandoned because “we have learned too much from them to leave them behind,” but “they came to occupy a less significant place in the interpretation of the Bible,” Love says.
He writes that scholars in Church of Christ settings remain committed to “pursuing the most learned approaches to biblical interpretation” while also acknowledging “the rich diversity of scripture, even in its diversity of beliefs about God.”
The Bible in the Congregation
When looking at how scripture is read at the church level, Love explores the tension that exists between graduate-trained ministers and their members. “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.” He also looks at how graduate-trained ministers are “less interested in the world that produced the text and more interested in the world the text would produce.”
Preachers following this postliberal approach, therefore, are not so much concerned with explaining the text, as they are with allowing it to perform, as can be seen in Walter Brueggemann’s book “Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation.”
Love concludes his essay by writing that “Churches of Christ have always been and always will be a movement centered in interpretation of the Bible…. 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.”
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*Rochester Christian University explored its current identity and mission as rooted in its origins as part of a grant funded by the Council of Independent Colleges. This effort took place in 2022 and was called Rochester Retrospect. A steering committee commissioned the writing of eight essays.
Click on the links below to read Dr. Mark Love’s full essay and the other Rochester Retrospect essays:
- American Origins of Churches of Christ by Dr. Keith Huey
- An Ecumenical Christian University: From “Christians Only” to “The Only Christians” and Beyond by Dr. Naomi Walters
- No Creed but the Bible: The Story of Scripture in Churches of Christ by Dr. Mark Love
- Alexander Campbell, Liberal Arts, and Integrative Learning by Dr. Keith Huey
- The “Apocalyptic Tradition” in Churches of Christ: A Countercultural Remembrance and Challenge by Dr. David Greer
- Missions to Missional: Rochester University’s Story in Churches of Christ from Otis Gatewood to Brian Stogner by Dr. Beth Bowers
- Learning Virtues for a Church of Christ University by Dr. Mark Love
- Rochester University: A Distinctive University – In Its Heritage and Its Future by Dr. Brian Stogner
