Cruciform: "Shaped or arranged in
a cross."
Non sequitur: "The fallacy of
irrelevant conclusion; an inference that does not follow from the
premises."
Most of us are aware of the danger of
drawing unwarranted conclusions from faulty premises. If Newton had
inferred that the sky was falling because an apple dropped on his
head, he would have been guilty of a non sequitur. If one defines a
belief in Christ and the church based upon a "gospel" that excludes
"doctrine," one's premise is likewise faulty.
In religion, irrelevant conclusions are
extremely common and, accepted at face value, become guideposts that
lead into a spiritual wasteland. It helps little that the non
sequiturs are committed by scholars with college degrees; in fact, a
facade of scholarship disarms the initiate. Clothe this scholarship
in the mantle of one of "our" colleges and non sequiturs assume the
weight of biblical inerrancy.
Few books known to me are as full of non
sequiturs while masquerading under the guise of scholarship as The
Cruciform Church, a publication from Abilene Christian University
Press. Written as a trilogy, The Cruciform Church (C. Leonard Allen)
complements two earlier works: Discovering Our Roots: The Ancestry
of Churches of Christ (with Richard T. Hughes) and The Worldly
Church (with Hughes and Michael Weed). Speaking from the lofty
pinnacle of professorship at ACU, brother Allen strews one non
sequitur after another throughout the entire book, with all the
fervor of a man with a vision. Though a poor prophet, he is an
excellent "blind guide" (Matt. 23:16), leading the unwitting
into many ditches. His vision of the future misses the mark on
numerous details. Though valid points are made, readers should
exercise the caveat: "Let the reader beware." Allow me to provide
some examples of Allen's faulty reasoning.
Non sequitur: The
Past Controls the Future
In the preface, brother Allen commits
the first error, asserting: "It is one of the great conceits of our
time to imagine that we can sweep away the past and simply begin all
over again at the beginning. We cannot." Stating here what is
repeated many times later, brother Allen claims that we are shaped
by our past traditions and are unable to begin with a clean slate as
though we are "historyless." Thus, churches of Christ are unable to
think, act or decide on direction without carrying our baggage from
past generations into the future. We are captured inescapably by our
traditions.
That this conclusion is unwarranted, one
has but to note that Paul, the persecutor, blasphemer, and Jewish
apologist said of the past: "But what things were gain to me, those
I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but
loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord:
for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them
but dung, that I may win Christ" (Phil. 3:7, 8). Further, it
was Christ who warned of the danger of traditions since they "made
void the commandment of God" (Matt. 15:6). Restorationism
demands constant renewal to the New Testament ideal of revealed
Christianity by the shedding of traditions. True repentance makes
this possible, even as the church at Pergamos was challenged to put
away the Nicolaitans. Contrary to Allen's assertion, we can be
converted to Christ to the degree that we excise the past completely
and begin a new in Christ.
Non sequitur:
"Accepting a Past"
It is a non sequitur to deny that "one's
own church or movement stands above mere human history" (p. 5), if
by "one's own church" one intends "the Lord's church." The Lord's
church is unique and divine in origin, guided by the Spirit through
the Holy Scriptures. This is true of no denomination. While we may
reflect cultural mores in some areas, it is distinctly possible for
the Lord's church to stand above human history and remain true to
its heavenly mission in spite of past or present human influences.
As Paul said, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed. .
." (Rom. 12:2), and this in the midst of the Hellenizing
influence of the Greek culture. "Come ye out from among them, and be
ye separate" (2 Cor. 6:14-18) is a divine imperative,
permitting no fellow-ship with darkness of any kind.
Whether the author has a real grasp of
the Lord's church is doubtful. When he includes "Churches of Christ"
in the "larger story of Christianity" (p. 5), he calls for us to
accept that our "past" includes "Churches of Christ" as a
denomination among denominations. He decries judging "most all of
Christian history" (particularly Protestantism) as only a "tragic
story of decay and corruption" (p. 6). This is strengthened when he
accuses N.B. Hardeman (among others) of unfairly dealing with Luther
and Calvin and others of the "Christian past" (p. 8) and advises
that "we take Christian traditions other than our own with great
seriousness" (p. 11).
Non sequitur: We
Must Rethink The Bible
Allen asserts that "Churches of Christ
must rethink our traditional way of reading the Bible" as a
"blueprint" or "a rigid `pattern,' as a collection of case law," (p.
20) because this leads to spiritual malnourishment. The "traditional
approach," we are told, "elevated inorganic, impersonal, and
mechanistic models of the Bible, the church, and the Christian life"
(p. 31). Weighty charges, indeed. Assuming the extent of influence
by John Locke and other Scottish Common Sense thinkers on Campbell,
brother Allen concluded that it was impossible for Campbell to study
the Bible independently, without being a "child of his times" (p.
25). It is surprising to learn (according to the author) that it was
Francis Bacon and "Baconianism" that gave rise to the "stringent
`pattern' orthodoxy" (p. 29) of Moses Lard. Did you realize it was
human dogmatism and not true biblical exegesis that suggested
"command, example and necessary inference" to understand the Bible?
According to this non sequitur, it is
impossible to know truth without being influenced by the leading
philosophy of the age. Can, then, inspiration be free of
contamination? Is the Bible understandable apart from philosophy?
One is led to wonder if Gamaliel unduly influenced Paul in writing
Scripture or if the school of Hillel colored Jesus' thinking about
divorce. Can any Bible doctrine be understood in its purity? If
Locke, Newton, et al, influenced the thinking of the pioneers about
their approach to doctrine (commands, examples, inferences; facts,
commands, promises), how can we be sure that Mark was not influenced
by the Gnostics when he wrote the gospel about Jesus? Or that Luke
was not influenced by Plato, Aristotle or others unknown to us?
But wait, there is hope, brother Allen
implies. There are mysteries at work in religion that cannot be
fathomed by this "analytic-technical" mindset that insists on book,
chapter and verse preaching. We are informed that "God works through
and beyond our limited, time-bound ways of reading his Word to draw
people of searching heart" (pp. 37, 38). I fear that his later
inferences are worse than the first.
Does God work "beyond . . . reading his
Word to draw people of searching heart"? If so, how? Is the message
of the cross not sufficient to "draw" (John 12:32) men to
God? Do we hear that part of the "mystery" of the gospel that we are
unable to fathom is the work of the Holy Spirit, apart from the
Scriptures, drawing men to God? Allen's earlier work already
mentioned, The Worldly Church, lends credence to this view.
Supplying what he believed to be some of the answers to the problems
among today's churches, Allen said it must include "a new openness
to the power of God's Spirit in our churches." But when we try to
let the Spirit work, "our tradition may present obstacles" because
our doctrine is "shaped more by modem rationalism than biblical
revelation" (pp. 74, 75). He proclaimed the answer to include the
"indwelling Spirit who enlightens our minds to the things of God . .
. . who assures our spirits..." (p. 75). The early church had the
"guidance of the Spirit at crucial points in the church's early
history:.. . Pentecost ... death of Stephen . . . baptism of the
first Gentile ... beginning of the first overseas mission.... Today
we need this same openness to the Spirit as we face the continuing
secularization of the church" (pp. 76, 77). This unfounded
conclusion (claiming that miracles from the Holy Spirit in the past
necessarily imply their continuance today) would lead him into
Pentecostalism if consistently followed.
Non sequitur: Strangeness
Most of us are aware of the mysticism of
the Orient. We have avoided the pitfalls of such error, however,
because of the emphasis in the Scriptures on knowledge (John
6:44, 45). God addressed a revelation to man (universally, not
just of the East) and required of him that he understand it (Eph.
3:4; 5:17; etc.), knowing that it will judge him in the last day
(Jn. 12:48). The Gnostics claimed to have access to some
"higher" knowledge (1 John 2:4) by which they could live
sinful lives and still please God. This produced a "spiritual
elitism" that refused to acknowledge or be restrained by the written
word. Some refused to accept John's epistles (3 John 9).
Mysticism claims that there is more to a
message than what is stated: objective truth is displaced by
intuitive imagination, what is felt is more important than what is
stated. This spiritual existentialism requires truth to be filtered
through human permission for it to be truth. We must remember
John 17:17: "Sanctify them in thy truth: thy word is truth." It
does not need my permission to be so.
C. Leonard Allen has a lot in common
with the Gnostics. His faulty premises are shaped, in part, by a
mysticism that denigrates the perception and perceptibility of God's
message: what is said is not what is meant. Common rules of
communication, therefore, do not apply and "great mysteries"
supersede "commands, examples and necessary inferences." This
suggests that there is more to the Bible than meets the eye: western
man cannot fathom the inscrutable oriental mind. Campbell's western
rationalism (and thus, ours, as well) does not appreciate the
metaphoric interpretation of Judaic thinking. If there is a mystery
in all this, it must be that Allen makes such a charge in the light
of Paul being a Roman, influenced by Greek (western) culture.
Timothy himself was a Greek.
But Campbell, we are told, "drew upon a
modem, western 'social compact' theory widely held in the political
thought of his own day. He thereby lost the strangeness of this
prominent biblical metaphor (of the kingdom, tr)" (p. 46). This
failure to understand because of "strangeness" extends to the very
knowledge of God. "But another kind of strangeness remains: the
strange, and strangely wonderful, ways of a transcendent God. It is
this strangeness that we must not that we finally cannot dispel" (p.
48). "But there is another, very different model for understanding
reality, one that confronts mystery and strangeness without driving
it out. We can represent it simply by inverting our pyramid. Here
the lines of understanding do not narrow and converge to a single,
fixed point. Rather, they open out ever wider, reaching always
beyond our grasp or control. The more we learn the more we see what
there is to learn. The more we grasp the more we perceive what we do
not yet grasp" (pp. 48, 49). "But the deeper we enter into the
mystery the more it beckens [beckons, tr] and allures, dazzles and
surprises. Before it we find ourselves alternately befuddled and
enlightened, humbled and exhilarated. Just when we have established
the boundaries of the possible, God unexpectedly enlarges them" (p.
52). Such nonsense denies an understanding of finished revelation
(Jude 3; Eph. 3:4). And it is but a short jump from this untrue
premise to the faulty conclusion held by many that truth is
mysterious, unknowable. If one insists on the particulars of the
Lord's church, the Lord's supper, music in worship, or the role of
women in the church, we are reminded that we cannot know the truth
because of a cultural mindset that prohibits modem man from a
restoration of ancient Christianity. To insist on doctrinal purity
is to destroy this "wonderful strangeness." Paul's answer to such
error was to remind that we know the mystery in Christ (Eph. 3:4;
Col. 2:2, 8) when we read the Scriptures.
Guardian of Truth - November 3,
1994
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Other Articles by Tom Roberts
The Cruciform Church - A Study in non-Sequiturs (Part
2)
The Gospel-Doctrine
Distinction - Part 1
The Gospel-Doctrine
Distinction - Part 2
The
Gospel-Doctrine Distinction - Part 3
What Does it Mean to Preach the Cross?
Extremes Concerning the Church
