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Chapter 2 – First things first – getting our heads out of the sand
I don’t know exactly when it happened. But we, the rank and file of the conservative churches of Christ, even the educated, stuck our heads in the sand. After the split with the mainstream over the institutional issue in the fifties, the entire mainstream was undergoing enormous change. The progressives were leaving the mainstream in droves. We knew some of the terms – “unity in diversity,” the Ketcherside movement, the Boston movement, etc. But aside from attacking the particular doctrine that bothered us, we were not looking at the big picture.
The big picture was that the progressives were starting to see the fallacies in the whole church of Christ hermeneutic, in our approach to primitivism and the Old Testament, and the fallacies in the culture that had developed in the churches of Christ. They were making some great arguments about these, and writing some great books; I reference some of these in this book. Both Edwin Harrell and Richard Hughes document the progressive movement well in their books on church of Christ history.[1] [2] I will reference both of these books frequently. But we in the rank and file – the regular Joe Member of the conservative church, did not take the time to understand what was going on. The progressives were attacking the mainstream, and that attack was aimed at the conservatives as well, only we had already been “quarantined” and most of us didn’t even know it was going on. B.C. Goodpasture’s famous quarantine on those churches who were against using church funds to support institutions[3] such as missionary societies like the Herald of Truth and colleges like Abilene Christian had brought a whole new wing to the churches of Christ – the “conservative,” or “non-institutional” wing. The quarantine cut off almost all communication between the mainstream and the conservatives; we weren’t fellowshipping them, and they weren’t fellowshipping us.
That quarantine proved more powerful than perhaps Mr. Goodpasture ever envisioned. Not only did it free each mainstream church from dealing with institutionalism, it proved to have an isolation effect on conservative churches hearing what was happening within the mainstream. In particular, after the mainstream had quarantined the conservatives, the mainstream had a new battle brewing on the left with the progressives. But we in the conservative church did not feel that pain; we had written them off already. I suppose to the conservative leaders that is a good thing; the ideas of the progressives were in some ways removed from us. But there were some valid points the progressives were making, and most of us never heard them. Which one of us has read, or even heard of, the magazine Wineskins? Or are aware of Rubel Shelly’s book “The Second Incarnation: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century Church?” Or perhaps most significantly, knew that the progressive and mainstream camps of the churches of Christ remained “fairly evenly matched at the end of the twientieth century, but time and youth seem to be on the side of the progressives”?[4] What was this movement that overtook half of the mainstream in 50 years?
Indeed, not only were we not hearing about these arguments from the mainstream because we had been quarantined from them, but we by and large isolated ourselves from these. While preachers and elders were glad to attack a particular doctrine, they were not so quick to bring up arguments against the core of who we were; against primitivism, our legalistic interpretation of the law of Christ, and the command-example-necessary inference hermeneutic that was the basis for all of this. Debates have long since ceased as a mechanism to defend truth, so hearing the opposition through this venue was gone.[5] Bible classes, which would be the single most logical place to question our interpretation of scripture, had become and remain a word each of us needs to face; propaganda. We would teach our doctrine, we ourselves would decide which arguments against that doctrine should be defeated, then we ourselves would defend our doctrine with the tried and true verses. Any stray comment in a Bible class was quickly squelched by all the leaders of the congregation using those same tried and true verses, and peer pressure assured those comments weren’t coming up again, and if so, rarely.
In short, we inbred ourselves. We never let contrarians in, neither in person nor by carefully reading their literature. We “represented” the contrarians, only bringing up the arguments we could easily squash. I would like to think I am a relatively well-educated, thoughtful guy, and I was guilty of this to the max. I had no clue what was happening among the progressives and the mainstream until the last few years, nor an idea of how and why so many of the progressives were questioning primitivism and our hermeneutic. I didn’t read, even though the information had been out there for decades. And I sure wasn’t hearing the arguments in the church. I know Christ came to free me from the guilt felt for my mistake here, but I struggle mightily to this day forgiving myself for how I could have so willfully closed my spiritual eyes, and blindly led others into the same stupid spiritual ditch.
My own spiritual journey after my realization of all of this is further proof of the lack of desire in the conservative churches to hear contrarian words. After I and a few others left the church of Christ, a fact known by many of my best friends, only one family from the church I spent 27 years as a teacher, deacon, and occasional preacher, came to ask me why. One. And that one family was not even one I would count in my circle of “closest” friends. Alas, I am afraid many of us in the conservative churches of Christ, and probably most, are just content to live in our own little world, knowing we know the truth, and never giving the contrarian view a chance.
In a later chapter, I will commend the churches of Christ for their general efforts in seeking out the truth of the doctrines of Jesus (see “Keeping our search for truth,” chapter 24). I believe our desire to understand doctrine and scripture, and keep things in context, is a good thing that we excel at above many others. But somewhere along the line, we quit seeking the truth of things, and sought only to seek and memorize our truth. We failed in seeking out some of the basic principles (spirit) of Jesus teachings; a proper understanding of liberty and law; topics for which Jesus and the apostles were very clear. We failed to take proper time to look around us and understand the scriptural arguments people were making about us. We would do well to spend more time seeking out the arguments of those who oppose us. We have got to get our heads out of the sand, stop inbreeding ourselves with our own doctrine, and willingly confront those who would question us. If you have gotten to at least this chapter in this book, you have made a start, and I thank you for that.
As to providing the reasons this desire for ignorance became so prevalent, I am no group sociologist. But I believe we were overcome by a combination of the culture of our times and our own culture. We were beginning to be influenced by the culture of our times; our lives were packed with our own families; our wives were moving in to the work force and becoming “soccer moms.” Both parents were becoming responsible for dinner and housecleaning, checking homework after a long work day or a practice, and there was simply less time to devote to thinking about issues outside of the family. We, like everyone in America, were bombarded with materialism, the internet, and a greater diversity of entertainment than ever, and lost a bit of our focus and time to this as well. We, like so many of our generation, were easily swayed by “sound bites,” by pejorative terms like unity in diversity that we could quickly dismiss as evil without taking much thought of what it really meant. We no longer showed the time or inclination to study a topic that takes chapters, or a book, or a week of sermons and not one sermon, to digest. And when you combine this with our own culture, where we knew we had the truth already (see “From Judgment to Fellowship, chapter 12); well, we just closed our eyes. We closed our eyes to what was going on, became content with the truth as we knew it, ignored all other indications to the contrary, and lived out our own little lives with our own little happy clan who believed what we did. The expression that comes to mind is “to hell with everyone else;” a phrase we not only lived out, but sadly believed literally.
I do not believe the conservative churches of Christ are a cult. Unlike the Hotel California, you can not only check out any time you like, you can leave. However, we have some oddly cultish characteristics. Our own self-imposed isolation from both people and literature who question us is one example. Another is the peer pressure inflicted upon those in our group who do question us; so while you may check-out, you may be marked, withdrawn from, or at a minimum spiritually persecuted on the way out the door. It is one of those fascinating places where we are in direct opposition to the culture of our times. In a generation of a wealth of access to information, we have managed to isolate ourselves from any information that shows the fallacies of our beliefs. And as I will argue later in the section on cultural attitudes we must change, in a society of toleration, we are amazingly intolerant and judgmental of the smallest deviation from our own practice.
Of course, you would think this isolation is going to have to change. In this information age, the word is going to filter in, and you would assume what has started as a trickle will eventually be a flood, exactly as the progressive movement has been among the mainstream. Some people are going to start to see the flaws in our whole foundation, through books like this but more so through people far more eloquent than myself, and I hope have the courage to “open the floodgates.” Either the conservative churches of Christ will change, will have their own major split, or it will shrink as people leave individually. I will give some statistics in the last chapter of this book that may indicate this has already started. This book is meant to get that ball rolling among at least those in my sphere of influence. I hope some members of the churches of Christ will read it front to back, and take time to digest it. Then I hope they will read some of the referenced material, and start to look on the internet at some of the great arguments others are making. And spend some time praying and thinking about it.
But this all assumes that the vast majority don’t remain content with their heads in the sand. Up until now, that has certainly been the case. I am a skeptic by nature, and that is my fear. First, I fear that this book, like the others before it, will not be read. I also fear that if it does manage to find its hands in a few, it will not be read by many to understand the overall context of the points made. It will not be read to inspire long-winded discussion, debate, and thought. Rather, some will lift their head from the sand momentarily, with their church of Christ blinders firmly attached, take a few verses from the argument without looking at the whole argument, point out the fallacy using a verse or two taken woefully out of context, label me and others as false teachers, and stick their heads back in the sand.
The question to you the reader is. . . do you have the courage to defend your truth? You have read up to this point in the book. Will you finish it? Will you read other books like it? Will you talk to those who have left, and engage in some lively debate. Will you discuss this with me? If you have the truth, are you willing to defend it? Will you ask questions of your leaders in bible classes, and stand up to the persecution?
Will you consider at least the possibility that “church” and “church of Christ” are not the same?
[1] Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1996)
[2] David Edwin Harrell Jr., The Churches of Christ in the 20th Century: Homer Hailey’s Personal Journey of Faith (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2000)
[3] Ibid., p. 138
[4] Ibid., p. 218.
[5] Michael W. Casey, Saddlebags, City Streets Cyberspace: A History of Preaching in the Churches of Christ, (Abilene, Texas: Abilene Christian University Press, 1995), p. 54.