The course final was a paper summarizing the key movements in Restoration History and how those key movements contributed to the contemporary state of Churches of Christ in the United States.
I remember so vividly writing on my belief that the Churches of Christ (in 1993 and now) were not at a crossroads of history -- as so many were proposing in 1993 -- but in the midst of a serious identity crisis. It seemed to me that the tenets of the movement, so long loyal to the teachings of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, were moving toward a more sympathetic view of Barton W. Stone's teaching. As the chief movers-and-shakers of Restoration History in America, Campbell and Stone could not have been more polar opposite in the way they envisioned church. Campbell took a more orderly, logical approach to interpreting Scripture; Stone was more charasmatic and given to emotion with a high view of the personal implications of faith.
On the flight home from El Paso Wednesday, I was finishing up an excellent book by Richard Hughes titled Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America. In the book, Hughes concludes with the same position I took in my paper for Dr. Haynie's class.
"Thus, Rubel Shelly, Philip Morrison and Mike Cope (through their message in Wineskins magazine) championed many of the ideals held by Barton Stone, David Lipscomb and R.H. Boll, but they pointedly backed away from the highly rational orthodoxy that had descended from the Campbell side of the movement and that had dominated Churches of Christ since World War I...The change taking place among Churches of Christ was no mere reform, no mere evolutionary development within the bounds of traditional nineteenth-century assumptions, Rather, it was fundamentally a paradigm shift -- a shift from a patternistic version of Christian primitivism filtered through Lockean empericism and Scottish Common Sense rationalism to an emphasis on the subjective dimensions of the Christian religion -- faith, hope and love realized in the lives of believers through the power and grace of God" (372-3).
I suggest the change(s) taking place within the Churches of Christ are not simply a concerted effort to replace twenty centuries of truth but a move toward a branch of our heritage that has often been muted and ignored.
