Origins of the Church of Christ - Part 1

Origins are always an important part of any story, fictional or true.  Knowing where something comes from is important to know why something is what it is, what brought about its characteristics, and where it will likely go and what it may become in the future.  To borrow inappropriately from Robin Williams, "what it is, what it was, what it will be!"  (See, you can prooftext "Mork and Mindy" just as well as you can the Bible!)

This is the reason, for better or for worse, that every time someone makes a Superman movie, they have to include the story of his birth on Krypton.  To understand Batman, we have to understand the impact of the murder of his parents.  It's why it is important to know about Lily Potter's sacrifice for her son in the Harry Potter series.  Nothing else that happens in the story makes sense without knowing where everything started.  Because without the origin, we wouldn't have what exists now.

And then we wouldn't have Hermione.  And that makes us sad.

Outside of the realm of fiction, knowing origins is just as important.  We certainly don't want to elect people who don't know the history of our country.  (Although, arguably, we continue to do it anyway.)  It is important, for instance, for African Americans to know about slavery and Jim Crow, because that is their origin in the USA.   If you want to be a computer whiz, you've got to know about DOS and ENIAC and any other combination of letters that I'm just guessing have something to do with early computing.  It's important to know where movements like Confucianism began, in order to understand and work within Chinese culture today.  Without understanding your own origins, you can't know who you--yes, you!--really are.

And that is a major problem within the Church of Christ today.  Hardly any of their adherents are aware of their origins.  And those who are aware only have a cursory knowledge of it, and what they do have is almost always very skewed.  The vast majority of adherents to Church of Christ theology truly believed that their church was founded in 33 AD, by Jesus Christ himself, and that there is a straight line between them and the first century.  Many people in the Church of Christ have never heard about Alexander Campbell or Barton W. Stone.  They think Cane Ridge is a place in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.  They have no idea that there ever was such a publication within their church as The Christian Baptist.  (If someone published a journal with that title today, they'd lose their minds.)  They don't know that their church is related to the Disciples of Christ or the Christian Church.  They've heard of the words "Restoration" and "Movement," but they don't know what happened.

And the tragic fact is that there are a lot of preachers out there who are telling them that it's not important and they don't need to know.

In the introduction to his history of the Church of Christ, "Reviving the Ancient Faith," Richard Hughes states that there were 4 major themes that shaped the character of the tradition from their beginning.

This many.

He writes:

First, the defining characteristic of Churches of Christ throughout their history, until late in the twentieth century was the notion of the restoration of primitive Christianity--the attempt to recover in the modern age the Christian faith as it was believed and practiced in the first century.  This vision flourished especially in the heady, utopian climate of the early nineteenth century when Churches of Christ in America first began.  Many Americans of that period, deeply impressed with the glories of the new nation and of the land it occupied, imagined that a golden age was near, perhaps even the final triumph of the kingdom of God  In that context, a number of religious movements dedicated themselves to recovering primitive Christianity in all its purity and perfection.  The two most notable manifestations of that impulse in the antebellum period were the Churches of Christ and the Latter-Day Saints, though these two traditions took that impulse in very different directions.  Throughout this book, I use the term "primitivism" to refer to this attempt to recover the ancient faith.

The correlation that Hughes draws between the newly settled America and the rise of the Church of Christ is quite interesting.  It puts into perspective their initial desire to go back to primitive religion, because at that point in history, America was a very primitive place.  These early Americans were just starting over, and thus it makes sense that they'd want to do the same with religion.  They'd left the constraints and persecution of the Church of England.  They'd established a new country.  This new world was a mulligan for them:  a chance to do everything over, do it differently and fix what wasn't working.

Churches of Christ today claim to be emulating the primitive church, as well, and often they audaciously claim to be identical to it.  Many of them claim to actually be the primitive fully-restored first century church, and they insist that folks from the first century would be right at home in their worship services.

"Yes, I'm an elder at the Damascus Road Church of Christ in Jerusalem.  We didn't worry about kitchens in the buildings in my time, because fire wasn't invented yet."

Personally, I find the Church of Christ claim to primitivism somewhat suspect.

For one thing, it appears the first century church were doing things that caused quite a considerable lot of them to end up in jail or just flat-out murdered.

Meanwhile, you tell a 21st century Church of Christ person that they can't make everyone pray at a football game, and they go running around, clucking like chickens:  "PERSECUTION! PERSECUTION! THEY'RE TAKING OUR RIGHTS! THE WORLD HAS GONE TO HELL!" and then when they're tired of that, they retire back to their expensive homes to rest on their over-stuffed couches and beds.  Then they write on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress, newspaper comment sections, and literally anywhere else they can navigate to with their high-end computer and high-speed internet connection to tell people all over the world how oppressed they are, not noticing the irony in that nobody is deleting their ravings or stopping them from saying anything they want.  And then they go to their nice, palatial, tax-free, multi-million dollar church building on Sunday and talk about how they no longer have any rights, and are persecuted, and everyone else in their nice Sunday suits nods and agrees with them.

They told us we can't make everybody stop doing stuff we don't like!  HOW LONG, LORD, HOW LONG??

Meanwhile first century Christians just pretty much either stayed under the radar or got croaked.

In all seriousness, though, do any of you truly imagine that a first century gathering would look anything like a Church of Christ service?  Would they be wearing ties, or would they have on what they worked in that day?  Would they have a 3-song-a-prayer-and-a-song format before the lecture?  Would someone read announcements?  Would they be in pews?  In a dedicated church structure?  Would they pass crackers or unleavened bread for the Lord's Supper?  Would it be in nice pewter trays?  Would women have been allowed to help pass it around?  Would they have "opening" and "closing" prayers that were memorized and repeated every week?  Would they have an invitation song?  Would someone stand in front of them madly swinging his arm around, leading the group in a song that they were reading from a hymnal?

Let's take it a step further.  Would the service of the Church of Christ today look anything like this?

What then shall we say, brothers and sisters?  When you come together, each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.  Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.  If anyone speaks in a tongue, two--or at the most three--should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret.  If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God.  Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said.  And if a revelation comes to someone who is sitting down, the first speaker should stop.  For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged.  The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets.  For God is not a God of disorder, but of peace--as in all the congregations of the Lord's people.  (1 Corinthians 14:26-32)

My feeling here is that Churches of Christ are not nearly as primitive as they let on.

A good question at this point might be this:  Are we really even supposed to emulate the first century church in everything?  It's a question worth asking.  Or maybe, just maybe, we're meant to carry the core of Christian values (love God, love each other, etc.) into our OWN culture and make it work there, without trying to force the practices and values of an ancient culture in places they were never meant to fit.

Also, a key point here is where Hughes hints at "the final triumph of the kingdom of God."  That turns out to be a key reason for the beginning of the Restoration Movement that produced the Church of Christ.  But that's fodder for yet another post.

This is literally the only non-pornographic image that came up when I searched for "tease" on Google Images.

I did say there were 4 major themes in the origin of the Churches of Christ, didn't I?  Next time, I'll talk a little bit about the D-word.  "Denomination."  Ooooooh...