Best books on CoC history

[longdistancerunner]

The Cane Ridge Reader edited by Hoke S. Dickinson. This is a compilation of works mostly by Barton W. Stone. It was a revolutionary book in my development. Being a first hand source, one is exposed to the fact that Elder Stone was very far from the positions which came to define 20th century CoC doctrine. For example, he was always a proponent of the revivalist conversion experience and somewhat ambivalent to baptism.

Hughes in Reviving the Ancient Faith makes a strong case that the CoC was a splinter group of the Disciples of Christ in 1906. They borrowed many of the ideas of the DoC without understanding the context that Campbell intended for those rules (Campbell didn't really believe everyone else had to believe the way he believed). Overall Hughes contention was that Campbell was an ecumenicalism and wanted there to be one Christian religion and that was much more important that his legalistic beliefs about interpretation of the scripture, for example he didn't fell. instrumental music should be used but fully tolerated groups that did.

[Moogy]

I finally purchased “Reviving the Ancient Faith” and I am slowly working my way through it. One new thing I learned was that Campbell changed many of his views over his lifetime. That makes it easy for present-day COCers to pick and choose which of his statements to quote, if they acknowledge him at all.

[Moogy]

The Cane Ridge Reader edited by Hoke S. Dickinson. This is a compilation of works mostly by Barton W. Stone. It was a revolutionary book in my development. Being a first hand source, one is exposed to the fact that Elder Stone was very far from the positions which came to define 20th century CoC doctrine. For example, he was always a proponent of the revivalist conversion experience and somewhat ambivalent to baptism.

I will look for a copy of “The Cane Ridge Reader”. Sounds interesting.

[ACUAlumnus]

I see there’s a book on Amazon entitled Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith. It’s by a Mormon author but has a foreword by Thomas H. Olbricht, a Harvard-educated, outstanding CoC historian and theologian who taught for a time at ACU (where he was my master’s thesis advisor), then became head of the Bible department at Pepperdine. Here’s the editorial review by Richard T. Hughes:

RoseAnn Benson has written one of the most important books of our time crucially important for Mormon studies and Campbell studies, to be sure, but also for American studies more broadly conceived. In shining a light on the restoration vision that animated both Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith, she has also illumined one of the driving themes of the American nation in the early nineteenth century. While neither Smith nor Campbell has received the full measure of attention each deserves, one can only hope that this monumental study will prompt American historians to pay closer attention to Campbell and Smith, to the restoration vision to which each devoted his life, and to thewindows each man opened onto the meaning of the American nation in its early years. --Richard T. Hughes, author, Myths America Lives By