Tag: Barton Stone

The Restoration Movement: The Failed Peace Movement

Faith and I both have deep roots in the Restoration Movement, with her family going back some five generations to the founding of the Movement and mine going back at least to my grandparents. But as far as I can remember, I never heard anyone in our realm of family and friends in the church explain the nonviolence of the gospel and, so far as I am aware, I never met a pacifist before I became one. Yet, the Restoration Movement was, in the beginning and for several generations, theologically Anabaptist. The key leaders in the original Movement held to a nonviolent reading of the New Testament, and this at a time when it caused them a great deal of trouble. But it may be that the same attitudes that gave rise to the Movement, and the recognition of the inherent peace of the gospel, also contributed to its virtual disappearance as a distinct group.

While the group repeated the theological turn to adult baptism, separation from government institutions, the recognition of the Church as the Kingdom (other than baptism this may sound strange to contemporary ears), which seems to be the shared understanding of peace churches, this gradual innovation was based on their own reading of the New Testament in the circumstance in whey they found themselves. The shared theology was not due to any historical connection to other peace churches but was due to, what might now be perceived as a naïve presumption, that the original text of Scripture can be understood through reason. Revelation and reason are not contradictory and one only has to set aside traditions, councils, and creeds, which divided the early church, and return to the text of the Bible. Given John Locke’s rationalism, one needs to simply clear out all of the misguided attempts of the church fathers to understand the Bible and take it for what it is obviously saying.

This was partly aided by a clear demarcation between Testaments, so that one need not be overly concerned with reconciling the Old and New Testaments. The same method was applied to post-Constantinian Christianity. It was presumed the church had fallen and it would only take a clearing of the decks and then a restoring of the original church, as it is described in the New Testament – thus the name “Restoration Movement.” The combination of being on the frontier in a new country in which the old country, with its “backward” traditions and hierarchy, was actively repudiated, and being part of an intellectual shift that no longer relied on authority and tradition, the early innovators in the Restoration Movement came to many of the same conclusions as other peace churches, both prior to and subsequent to the Protestant Reformation. Unlike previous peace churches, the Restorationists were figuring out their relationship to the world with a clean slate, absent the old world weighing down upon them. As the situation of slavery, the Civil War, and the Spanish American War, impinged upon them, they would adjust accordingly. This flexibility would be both the strength that gave rise to a repudiation of slavery and violence, but perhaps this same flexibility would eventually wipe out much of the distinctiveness of the original effort.  

This is to make it all sound too naïve and simple, as the Campbell’s and Stone were true intellectuals. John Howard Yoder, a neutral judge in the matter and no lightweight himself, concludes: “Other people were doing intellectually brilliant things in the nineteenth century, but in the realm of critical perspective on Christian social ethics, rooted in any kind of theological and scriptural accountability, these nonresistant Christian thinkers were the most serious intellectual phenomenon of the century.”[1] Alexander Campbell would engage key intellectuals and thinkers of his day in debate and proved himself to be a formidable intellect in several arenas, which partly explains the exponential growth of the Movement he more or less fostered.

In the first issue of the Christian Baptist (theological journals were key in the Movement) Campbell wrote of the vulgar contradiction of Christians creating orphans and widows in war so that they might manifest their purity of religion by providing for them:

Christian General, with his ten thousand soldiers, and his Chaplain at his elbow, preaching, as he says the gospel of good will among men; and…praying that the Lord would cause them to fight valiantly and render their efforts successful in making as many widows and orphans, as will afford sufficient opportunity for others, to manifest the purity of their religion by taking care of them!

In his “Address on War” he asks whether one Christian nation (defined as any nation with a Christian in it) has a right to wage war on another Christian nation (rendering the notion of “Christian nation” absurd). Then he asks whether one part of the Christian Church in one nation should wage war on another part of the Church in another nation? His answer is clear:

With this simple view of the subject, where is the man so ignorant of the letter and spirit of Christianity as to answer this question in the affirmative? Is there a man of ordinary Bible education in this city or commonwealth who will affirm that Christ’s church in England may of right wage war against Christ’s church in America?

Campbell also suggests there is no such thing as a just war as those being killed are not those who are guilty and those who fight are not responsible for declaring the war. He concludes,

War is not now, nor was it ever, a process of justice.  It never was a test of truth-a criterion of right.  It is either a mere game of chance or a violent outrage of the strong upon the weak.  Need we any other proof that a Christian people can in no way whatever countenance a war as a proper means of redressing wrongs, of deciding justice, or of settling controversies among nations?

Like Campbell, Barton Stone would come slowly to nonviolence, but the tipping point came when he first encountered the extreme cruelties of slavery. He describes visiting with some professed Christians in South Carolina and being repulsed at their treatment of their slaves.

But in the midst of all this glory, my soul sickened at the sight of slavery in more horrid forms than I had ever seen it before; poor negroes! Some chained to their work— some wearing iron collars— all half naked, and followed and driven by the merciless lash of a gentleman overseer— distress appeared scowling in every face.[2]

The impact slavery would have for Stone and many in the Restoration Movement is paralleled in the depiction of Frederick Douglas, who describes the repulsiveness of a faith that could tolerate this sort of violence.

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. . . . It is . . . a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there, and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation— a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God.[3]

Douglas claimed there was a difference so wide between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of this land “that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.”  What was absolutely clear to a run-away slave was also clear to Stone who was inundated with the same images, such that he too came to conclusions like those of Douglas. The “slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” was precisely the impetus for Stone’s participation in reform.

Stone not only turned against slavery but against the laws and values of the United States and it would be the beginning of his theological journey toward an apocalyptic reading of Christianity.

We must return to the government, laws, and ordinances of our rightful king, the Lord Jesus, before we shall be ever gathered together and become worthy subjects of his kingdom. We must unite our energies, advance the government and kingdom of our Lord, and meddle not with the government of this world, whether human, ecclesiastical, or political, or civil; all others aside from that of heaven will be put down by a firm decree of our Lord before the end come.[4]

Stone would hold true to this ultimate conviction of non-participation in the affairs of this world (at great personal cost), as Christians must focus on the government, laws and ordinances of Jesus in order to obtain unity, and they must not meddle in the government of this world.

David Lipscomb, also due to the institution of slavery, developed an even clearer demarcation between the church and the world. He compared all human government to the Babylon of revelation. What marks this universal Babylon of human government is that it always rests “upon the power of the sword.” This authority of the sword and its “mission” of “strife and bloodshed” marks all government, other than that of Christ. “The fall of Babylon is the down fall of all human governments” and the establishment of the Kingdom of God will entail “the destruction of human institutions and authority, and the reinstation of God’s rule and authority on earth.” One can either serve God’s rule or the principalities and powers of this world, but each realm is controlled by its “own peculiar spirit that abides in it and animates each of its members.”  The government one participates in and supports is determinative of what one worships.

God, through his gentle, meek, loving, self-sacrificing Son established the Church of Christ, and imparted to it his spirit to dwell in, animate, guide, and control that body and every member thereof. Whoever puts himself under the guidance or control of a different spirit ceases to be a member of the Church or body of Christ.[5]

As with the book of Revelation, Lipscomb pictures the final judgment as involving “the complete and final destruction, the utter consuming of the last vestige of human governments and institutions.”[6] Though located in Nashville, which would be consumed by the Civil War, Lipscomb wrote to both sides in the conflagration outlining his and his churches position, so that Churches of Christ in the South were the largest group recognized as neutral conscientious objectors. As Lipscomb explained,

In the beginning of the late strife that so fearfully desolated our country, much was said about “our enemies.” I protested constantly that I had not a single enemy, and was not an enemy to a single man North of the Ohio river. I have never been brought into collision with one— but very few knew such a person as myself existed. . . . Yet, these thousands and hundreds of thousands who knew not each other . . . were made enemies to each other and thrown into fierce and bloody strife, were imbued with the spirit of destruction one toward the other, through the instrumentality of human governments.[7]

The mission of Christ’s kingdom “is to put down and destroy all these kingdoms” built on the shedding of blood and “to destroy everything that exercises rule, authority, or power on earth” other than Christ. Christ’s servants cannot enter into league with the very kingdoms which he is set against and set to destroy. Christians should have no role in government and need only submit to the degree allowed by the first and highest obligation to obey God.

The question arises as to what happened to this core belief of the early Restorationists? For the most part, the contemporary majority have succumbed to evangelical beliefs and the gnostic tendencies of a privatized religion. Some would link the problem to Campbell’s and Stone’s rationalistic approach to Scripture and the succumbing to the shifting sands of “common sense.” The contextual nature of their nonviolence shifted with the context, and with their heirs was contextualized into oblivion. The feeling of antagonism with the world would soon diminish, with one Restoration preacher even serving as President of the United States. With the ending of slavery, perhaps the repulsion of the world was not so obvious (a strange conclusion in these racist times). The two world wars would impact all three branches of the movement, with peace churches disappearing and a theology of peace hanging on mainly in a few key academic institutions of the Churches of Christ. Clearly, the theology was inadequate. Perhaps the intense focus on the form and structure of the church failed to preserve the unique content. Whatever the cause or causes, the sense of restoring the peaceable Kingdom of the New Testament Church, the thing which defined early Restorationists, has been mostly abandoned by the Restoration Movement.

[1] John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (p. 268). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Thanks to Tom Evans for his lecture notes and the Campbell references.

[2] Barton W. Stone, “A Short History of the Life of Barton W. Stone, Written by Himself ” (Cincinnati: J. A. & U. P. James, 1847), in The Cane Ridge Reader, ed. Hoke S. Dickinson (Cane Ridge, KY: Cane Ridge Preservation Project, 1972), 27– 28. In John Mark Hicks, Resisting Babel: Allegiance to God and the Problem of Government (Kindle Locations 442-444). Abilene Christian University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] Frederick Douglass, “What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787– 1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 262– 63. Quoted in Hicks 447-449.

[4] Quoted in Hicks, 152-155.

[5] Lipscomb, Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation to It (Nashville: McQuiddy Printing Company, 1913). 23 quoted in Hicks 778-779

[6] Lipscomb, 27

[7] Lipscomb, “Babylon,” Gospel Advocate 33, no. 22 (June 2, 1881): 340. Quoted in Hicks, 433.

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The End of an Era: Reflections on the Closing of Cincinnati Christian University

My wife and I met at CCU as did her parents, Mark and Pauline Maxey, and two of her brothers and their spouses. Faith’s extended family, including 3 uncles and an aunt, attended Cincinnati Bible Seminary (CBS) before it was designated a university and her uncle, Victor Maxey, was the school librarian for much of his life and much of the life of the school. Her Aunt, Isabelle, attended the school in its third year of operation. Isabelle’s father, R. Tibbs Maxey, drove her there in a Maxwell touring car from Boise Idaho and the old car had to be backed up Price Hill as it could not otherwise make the steep grade. Tibbs had experienced the divisiveness of liberalism up close, with Disciples’ organizations taking over two of the churches he had organized and he had watched the liberals capture his alma mater, the College of the Bible in Lexington, so he had a vested interest in the new school.   After hearing J. Russell Morse’s appeal for workers in China, Isabelle used her preparation at CBS in a lifetime of missionary service in Asia.

Faith’s father would make the journey to the school with his brother Tibbs and with Max Ward Randall from Minnesota Bible College. Mark was impacted at CBS by the teaching and preaching of Ira Boswell. During the Memphis convention, in which it was clear the liberals were making their move to capture the convention and the brotherhood, when the chairman had tried to quiet the objectors by intoning, “Let us pray,” Boswell had jumped up on a bench and shouted, “Pray nothin! I feel like fighting.” As Mark described him, “that was only part of his nature. He was at the same time one of the wittiest and most inspirational men I ever listened to.”

The outstanding class, in Mark’s memory, was a course on the Campbell debates taught by R. C. Foster. Cincinnati had been the sight of two of these debates and was in close proximity to the third, the debate on baptism with Nathan Rice, which had taken place in Paris Kentucky. This proximity to history and the sense that the tides were changing marked the atmosphere of the school. In Mark’s description: “The battle had not yet been won so the events related to the struggle were vigorously debated both in the classes and in the assemblies. The students knew what the issues were and why.” The “war” in Mark’s depiction and in his life-time of work had as much to do with allowing for freedom within brotherhood organizations as it did with higher criticism and theological liberalism.

Cincinnati was also the location of the United Christian Missionary Society and, due to World War II, two key informants of the Philippine struggle for independent missions, Juan Baronia and Ben Allison, were available. CBS became the center of a movement of independent missionaries and missions and Mark’s work for his B.D. thesis would detail the struggle against the UCMS as it occurred in the Philippines.  

Part of the significance of this depiction is its close ties to a specific historical projection, key personalities, and the story as it was being experienced. The Campbells and Stone had so grounded their reading of Scripture on reasonable interpretation that the broader sweep of Church history, inclusive of creeds and tradition, were largely brushed aside. Their own struggles, their deep intellectual engagement, their approach to Scripture and their particular experiences came to constitute its own significant history. This sense of continuing the historical struggle was passed to the early heirs of the movement.

The second-generation teaching at the school and the third generation of students, of which I would count myself, were bound to have a very different experience and sensibility. Neither Stone nor the Campbells hesitated to pose novel interpretations of Scripture and they were not anxious to establish a systematic theological understanding. The first generation at CBS were also practitioners of a new form of organization which was dependent upon a sense of individual freedom and the powers of individual interpretation.

 I may have gotten a distilled version of the anti-theology, anti-clergy, and anti-credentialing, in the person of Seth Wilson. Wilson (who made a point of his lack of ordination and credentials) had served as R. C. Foster’s teaching assistant at CBS, and though he never received a graduate degree, he was one of the founding faculty of Ozark Bible College. Ozark was in the mold of CBS, but specifically in the mold of R. C. Foster through the person of Seth Wilson. At that time, Ozark had no courses in theology. In its place we studied Acts, the life of Christ, and the epistles of the New Testament, and of course we had a class in Restoration History. One of my memories is of John Relyea, who would serve and die in the jungles of Papua New Guinea as a missionary, arguing with Seth in class that it was nonsense to be against a systematic theology as we all had one, either consciously or by default. Seth dismissed him, accusing him of thinking like a German.

The passage of CBS into the hands of a second generation of teachers is perhaps most notable in that with the hiring of Jack Cottrell, the school would undergo its first shift away from the inclinations against establishing a systematic theology. George Mark Elliot, who taught theology to Cottrell at CBS, like the Campbells and Stone, had engaged the theological enterprise in an ad hoc manner. Cottrell would set out his understanding of the theological catalogue in his own three volume systematics, which is the most extensive systematic theological statement by a single individual to come out of the Independent branch of the Movement.

Cottrell does not often appeal to Stone-Campbell resources but largely affirms basic evangelical beliefs. Unlike the Campbells and Stone, he fully embraces Calvin’s version of penal substitution. (Stone had completely rejected the doctrine while the Campbells qualified it with a governmental notion of atonement.) Cottrell depicts Christ’s suffering on the Cross as the literal experience and payment for the penalty of eternal torturous existence. (R. C. Foster had warned that this sort of literal reading of hellish punishment as occurring in the suffering of Christ would reduce to contradiction.) In an innovation on original sin, Cottrell acknowledges that Romans 5:12-18 may depict a theoretical original sin wiped out by “Original Grace” given universally through the death and resurrection of Christ. Though he is pitting his Arminianism against Calvinism, as Elliot had understood, Arminianism is working within a Calvinist notion of sovereignty (seemingly reflected in this semi-Calvinist reading of Romans).

When it came time to write my Masters thesis under Cottrell I hit, innocently enough, on the worst of possible topics. Unbeknownst to me he had entered into discussion with Clark Pinnock and a group of “Open Theologians” who were reacting against notions of divine impassibility and an Augustinian understanding of God’s timelessness. I chose to write on and to defend some version of the traditional orthodox doctrine, though I had hoped to critique the Augustinian version of timelessness. It was not until I had initiated the research that I came to understand Cottrell believes (or did at that point) that God exists along a timeline or is temporal and that time is not created. I spent hours in discussion with Jack laying out the implications of suggesting God did not create time and that he is temporal. I equated it, in our conversation, with a Newtonian understanding with deistic implications. Needless to say, I never completed this thesis.

In the spirit of the founding of the school, Cottrell carried the fight against liberalism into theology, but with his emphasis on penal substitution, the unusual focus on the nature of God’s sovereignty, along with his teaching on women’s subordination and the notion that the Holy Spirit works only through the Bible, Cottrell’s articulation of theology is of a fundamentalist evangelical bent and is uneven at best. As George Mark Elliot had reportedly put it, “Cottrell may save us from attacks on biblical authority, but who will save us from his Calvinism?”

The early reactions against theological liberalism at CBS were mainly through New Testament scholarship, largely in the persons of R. C. Foster and his son, Lewis Foster. The tenor and quality of the argument changed with the shift to the battleground of theology. In my view theology was and is the way out of the morass of controversy between theological liberalism and fundamentalism. The moderate, Barton Stone-like tack of another Cincinnati graduate, James Strauss, whose tenure at Lincoln Christian Seminary is parallel to Cottrell’s at Cincinnati, indicates that the Restoration Movement and CBS had theological resources that could simultaneously resist both liberalism and fundamentalism. Strauss provided the impetus for a theological scholarship that moved beyond the modernist battles over authority and higher criticism and Lincoln has been marked by a steadier stream of orthodoxy. Theological fundamentalism simply does not contain the resources to counter the sort of rank liberalism that would eventually mark the demise of the original spirit of CBS. The history of the school followed a predictable pattern in the absence of these richer theological resources, so that the liberal biblical scholarship taught in the final years of the school was already outdated, a century behind, rendered passé by a variety of theological movements.

The closing of CCU marks the end of an era. [1] Its founders and the first generation of students were indeed in the midst of history making events. The Great Generation that went out from CBS changed the shape of missions and had a worldwide impact on the Church. The battles of the first generation, and their manner of engagement in the only way they knew, resulted in a school that had an international impact and defined a generation of ministers and missionaries.

[1] The “Historical Agreement” with another Bible College confounds the sad note of the school’s closing. The basic dishonesty in not addressing the needs of students and trumpeting instead an agreement with a school that has followed the same trajectory as CCU is an added blight. This school also recently received a rejection from the Higher Learning Commission and the reasons must be approximately those outlined in the HLC letter to CCU. Fifteen faculty and staff, mainly those teaching Bible and theology fired (the founding faculty retired or phased out), replaced with a focus on sports (4 full time coaches at a school of less the 200), the position of Registrar phased out, multiplication of administrative salaries and positions, mission drift, etc. etc.