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The Blueprint
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Speaking where the Bible speaks, and silent
where the Bible is silent. (About 20% of Churches of Christ keep
the following rules strictly.)
1. In the book and website
The Thunderous
Silence of God,
the author argues that we are to establish whether musical instruments are
authorized in worship to God by
1) apostolic command,
2) early church
example, or
3) necessary inference from early church example.
This method of establishing authority is based on a mistaken premise:
There
must be a rulebook in the New Testament for the work, worship and organization
of the local congregation.
The practice of establishing authority by command, apostolic example and
necessary inference, is a doctrine that descends from the reformed
Presbyterians (Alexander Campbell). See an article against
instrumental music in worship by an orthodox Presbyterian
here. Why
would one think that there has to be a rulebook for the church? Where did this
idea come from? Certainly not from the New Testament. Jesus never worried
about rules for worship either in the synagogue or in the coming church that he
was establishing. The only teaching we have from Jesus about church life is when Jesus tells people
how to draw the line on troublesome people (Matt. 18:15-17).
If Jesus was interested in congregational work and worship, why did he never
ever comment on it? Jesus said quite a bit, none of it about
congregational work and worship. Anyone who wants to be the church of Christ
should pay attention to that fact.
 2. The Reformation
was popularized* by
Martin Luther,
who in the zeitgeist and
the Holy Spirit nailed
95 objections
to the church door in his hometown in Germany (1517 A.D.). (Luther objected to the raising of church funds by selling
forgiveness--Michelangelo
was painting the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel at the time. It was expensivo.) The printing press had just been invented by
Gutenberg in Holland.
One of the first items printed were certificates for the forgiveness of sins
(indulgences) that were hawked in Germany by
John Tetzel (who
probably wore a shiny suit and white shoes and went on TV--but I digress).
Two
years after Martin Luther n ailed the 95 theses to the church door, a church
salesman started selling indulgences in Zurich, Switzerland, which
Ulrich
Zwingli opposed. Eventually Ulrich Zwingli opposed the Catholic view of the
sacraments--believing baptism and the Lord's Supper were symbolic and covenantal
(promises between man and God). He banned musical
instruments from churches because they obstructed the focus on the
preaching, but he encouraged lively singing. He instituted the Lord's Supper
with the members sitting at a long table with wooden cups of wine and wooden
platters of bread. He died defending Zurich against an attacking army sent by
the Roman church.
Ulrich Zwingli was extremely influential in the churches of Scotland and
England. One of Zwingli's disciples became a professor in the main seminary in
England training ministers in the Church of England. Puritans (who later became
the Pilgrims of America, and later the Congregational Church) followed Zwingli's
teachings.
 Add
a dash of
John Calvin's
authoritarian rule
of Geneva, Switzerland, a teaspoon of
DesCartes, a
tablespoon of
Francis
Bacon's logic, and a cup from the American Declaration of Independence and Voila! you have the souffle` of the Churches of Christ.
 The
next generation of Reformers was John Calvin. Originally a Renaissance lawyer and the son of a lawyer,
he was enamored with logic
and philosophy and went about
forming as logical a religion as possible. He rebelled against the
earn-your-salvation view of the Roman church and emphasized our need to
totally depend on God. He viewed God as despotic and
authoritarian: God chooses before we are born who will be lost and who will be
saved. No-one can call this unfair, Calvin maintained, because, in all justice,
everyone should be lost and burn in hell. If God chooses some to be forgiven,
then that is only because of God's mercy.
John Calvin ruled
Geneva, Switzerland
with strict biblical rules.
 Calvin
outlawed any criticism of himself in Geneva. Some of his own relatives were
hanged for adultery during his rule.
3. The Presbyterian Church arose in Scotland and Ireland out of John Knox's
teaching.
John Knox was a follower of John Calvin. By the time of Thomas and
Alexander Campbell, there had been a division in the Presbyterian Church over
whether the ruler of the city (burgh) was also the ruler of the congregation (as
Calvin was both spiritual and political head of Geneva). Thus the Campbells were
part of the Anti-burghers (actually the Old Light Seceder Anti-burgher
Presbyterian Church).
4. So what does this have to do with the hard-line Churches of Christ looking for a
rulebook? Everything. The lawyer attitude of John Calvin, the ruling
of Geneva, opposition to the Catholic Church's monopoly on salvation, and
the need to include or exclude people who take communion, all of these ideas
went into the attitude of reading the scriptures with a presupposition. The
presuppositions arose from each person's point of view:
If you were the Catholic
Church during the Renaissance you read the New Testament with a presupposition that
the church mentioned in the New Testament was the Catholic Church and all of its
hierarchy, traditions and decisions. Just as everyone met in
Jerusalem and decided what to do about the Gentile Christians (Acts 15), just so
everyone must obey the bishops when they are elected and meet to make decisions.
On the other hand if you were Martin Luther and John Knox you saw the whore of
Babylon in the book of Revelation as the Catholic Church itself.
 5. The early organization of congregations in the New Testament
mirrored exactly the
Jewish synagogue.
The Jewish synagogue organization had no authority in the "silence" of the Old
Testament.
There was no unit in the OT like the synagogue. There was the family, the tribe,
the nation, the priesthood, the temple, the Sanhedrin, but no synagogue
congregation with elders. Yet Jesus and the apostle Paul seemed quite
happy to work within its structure as long as they were permitted. They never
spoke out against its organization, nor did they ask where the authority for the
synagogue came from.
When confronted with this argument, members of the hardline churches of Christ
usually say that there were things in the OT that were authorized orally by God
to prophets that were never written down. Yet Jesus and all of the OT prophets
always appealed to the written scriptures, never to oral tradition for
authority. 6. The
hard-line Churches of
Christ are quite happy to have a God who switches rules without logic, from the
OT to the NT. Even
though they use logic to figure out the rules; the logic is divested of its
intuitive sense. Some are even proud of this counterintuitive paranoia. ("God
has a reason that we may not know about.") This presupposition is
foreshadowed in Calvin's view of a god who pre-determines who will be saved and
lost, and there is nothing you can do about it.
7. The hard-line Churches of Christ also don't seem to find it strange that God would hide
his rulebook in a history of the early Church. It does not seem odd to
some churches of Christ that the rules for the Israelites were clearly laid out in
the Law of Moses, but now in the New Testament we have to carefully sift out the
rules from the examples and expediencies with the
skill of paranoid lawyers. ("To be safe we must not use instrumental music.")
8. If we take away the presuppositions then what do we have? We have Jesus who
tells us how to love one another and describes to us the character of God. Then
we read a history (Acts) of how the early church responded to the Word made
flesh. That's all. It is not a rule book. It is not a restriction. It is an
account of how they responded to God. We may respond differently. When
we make this argument
to hard-line CoCers, they are horrified:
1. What would the church do if we quit teaching against
denominationalism?
2. How would you know you were close to God if you
didn't have a rule book?
The answers:
1. We would spend our energy helping the helpless. We
would teach people how to love and forgive each other. We would teach people
of the wonderful character of God.
2. We would accept by faith the wonderful gift that God
has given us: all our past, present and future sins have been nailed to the
cross (Heb. 10), we are adopted into the family of God, we are imputed with
the righteousness of Christ (Rom. 4, II Cor 5:21), we share his glory and
honor (II Thess. 2:14).
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The practice of establishing authority by command, apostolic example and
necessary inference, is a doctrine that descends from the reformed
Presbyterians (Alexander Campbell) and The Scottish School of Common Sense.
See
here for Pharisees and Instrumental Music.
*Earlier protesters and reformers of the Roman Catholic Church include the
Waldensians of
Italy (800 A.D.) and England
(1120 A.D.)
Jesus never worried about rules for worship either in the synagogue or in the
coming church that he was establishing.
"The New Testament is as perfect a constitution for
the worship, discipline, and government of the New Testament Church, and as
perfect a rule for the particular duties of its members, as the Old Testament
was for the worship, discipline, and government of the Old Testament Church, and
the particular duties of its members."
--Thomas Campbell,
"Declaration and Address"
"Using the New Testament as our blueprint we have
reestablished in the twentieth century Christ's church. "
--Batsell Barrett Baxter and Carroll Ellis in
Neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jew
The presuppositions arose from each person's point of view.
There is no authority for the establishment of the Jewish synagogue anywhere
in the Bible. The entire Bible is "silent" about the organization of the
synagogue.
Why would God would hide
his rulebook in a history of the early Church?
For more on Contextless Prooftext Sermons click
here.
The
history of the early church is not a rule book. It is not a restriction.
It is an account of how they responded to God. We may respond differently.
For more on Black-and-White thinking
click here.
For more on Stages of Faith click here.
What does the New Testament
claim to be?
Click here for a Legalism Questionnaire |
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