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“How Beautiful Are the Feet” – Romans 10:15
God did not entrust the gospel to angels, to supernatural beings, to higher life forms without foibles and feet of clay. Indeed, he entrusted the gospel to men. As an objective fact, this is rather astounding. The message of salvation is in feeble human hands!
The Cruciform Church: A Study in Non Sequiturs
Tom M. Roberts
Part 1
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 XXXVIII: 21, p. 11-12
November 3, 1994
November 3, 1994
The Cruciform Church
Study Non-Sequiturs
Tom M. Roberts
Part 2
(This concludes a two-part study of C. Leonard Allen’s The Cruciform Church.Faulty reasoning (non-sequiturs) by the author presents a warped view of the gospel and the church of Christ. If this is representative of the thinking among liberal brethren, there is little wonder as to the source of a “new hermeneutic” and its effect upon churches who adopt it.)
Non Sequitur: Doctrine Idolatry
I am sure that there are some folks somewhere who elevate doctrine to idolatry and who worship the Bible, considering it a talisman to ward off evil spirits. But I must confess that I have not heard such teaching among my brethren. Leonard Allen claims to have heard it a lot.
This non sequitur states that “Even the Bible itself or our own religious tradition can become idols” (p. 88). “It becomes an idol when our faith becomes focused on Scripture rather than in the God Scripture reveals to us.” He feels compelled to remind us that “Doctrines do not save us; we are saved by Christ” (p. 89). This knowledge is too much! We are awed by such pearls of wisdom. Actually, such smugness of religious superiority does little to commend him. It does not follow that an obedience of doctrine dethrones Jesus (1 John 5:3). It does not follow that a faithful compliance with Scripture elevates it to “doctrine-idolatry” (p. 89). Must it be “either/or” with regard to Christ and Scripture? Can it not (must it not) be “both/and” Christ and his message?
It is not true that since God does “impossibilities” (wonders, miracles), we cannot read the Bible with our “analytic-technical” mindset and grasp what God is doing. The God who does “impossibilities” is the God who has spoken to us in an accommodative way (human language) and requires obedience (Matt. 7:21).
Non Sequitur: The Displaced Cross
According to brother Allen, no other subject comes anywhere near the importance of this one. His charge: “First, as we shall see, `the word of the cross’ has been significantly displaced in the history of Churches of Christ. Throughout the four generations since Stone and Campbell we have tended to push the cross into the background and thus to proclaim an anemic and distorted gospel” (p. 113).
That this is a faulty premise (before we look at the unwarranted conclusions) can be seen from Allen’s definition of the “word of the cross.” Falling into the same error as C. H. Dodd (seen in Allen’s bibliography), Carl Ketcherside and others before him, Allen limits “the word of the cross” or the “gospel” to something vaguely defined as the “core message” or “apostolic kerygma” that somehow “underlies the New Testament writings” (p. 114). Whether or not Allen knows it, Dodd is a modernist, denying the inspiration of Scripture. Yet Dodd is cited by many as an authority on this disputed “core gospel.” While some demand five or more facts in this core gospel, Ketcherside required seven: birth, life, death, burial, resurrection, ascension and coronation of Jesus. No doctrines or commands are included in this gospel. Dodd claimed to have identified passages that taught this “core gospel” before redactors polluted the gospel with doctrinal demands. Dodd’s (and Ketcherside’s) theology was “faith only” (baptism is a command and not a part of the gospel) with salvation being secured by the acceptance of this “gospel” for justification. After one is saved, he may or may not accept some “doctrines” for sanctification but no doctrinal flaw would interfere with justification or limit fellowship with those who accepted the deity of Christ based on the core gospel.
Allen’s premise is that the “gospel” is limited, by definition, to the facts of Jesus’ atoning work; preaching the “word of the cross” is specific to those alone. Preaching from the epistles would not be preaching the “gospel.” Allen’s unwarranted conclusion, based on this faulty premise of “gospel,” is that many of us have displaced the “word of the cross.” If one allows his egregious definition, he is right. But Peter, Paul and James would also be guilty, and that suggests the fault lies with Allen’s definitions and not our preaching.
“Allen, like Don Quixote, tilts at windmills, because he doesn’t understand true gospel preaching. To him, preaching about baptism, the church, the Lord’s Supper, marriage and divorce, or any doctrinal matter (including, conceivably, the deity of Christ as doctrine) is not preaching `the cross.’
Allen, like Don Quixote, tilts at windmills, because he doesn’t understand true gospel preaching. To him, preaching about baptism, the church, the Lord’s supper, marriage and divorce, or any doctrinal matter (including, conceivably, the deity of Christ as doctrine) is not preaching “the cross.” Therefore he flays about like one possessed, decrying the lack of cross-centered preaching.
No one who is a Bible believer would argue about the necessity of putting Christ as both center and circumference of our faith and practice. Bring out all the superlatives and they fail to do justice to God’s love in Christ on Calvary. But Allen has no corner on the market in appreciating the Savior. We, too, understand atonement, justification, sacrifice and propitiation. He chastises without reason for a perceived displacement of Christ’s passion on the cross when the fault lies with his imperfect working hypothesis of the “word of the cross.”
This ill-conceived notion, however absurd, is illustrated when Allen applies his theory to the giants of the Restoration period (Campbell, Stone, Brents, Lard, etc.). They were not “cross centered” in their writing and preaching, we are told. Ignoring the fact that preaching the “word of the cross” includes “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) by testifying “to the gospel of the grace of God” (v. 24), Allen tilted at Campbell’s “The Millennial Harbinger” and Brents’ The Gospel Plan of Salvation as being “preoccupied with form, structure, and the setting in order of what was lacking” (p. 117), thus displacing the “word of the cross.” Brother Allen gives little weight to the fact that sectarians of that period readily agreed with Campbell and others as to the atoning work of Jesus and the central place he occupied in their faith. He seems oblivious to the fact that there were volumes of things keeping sectarians in spiritual bondage that needed to be addressed. It might be comfortable for Allen to sit in his ivory tower at Abilene in 1990 and second guess the pioneers as they fought daily battles for truth in 1840. But those stalwart men waged battles with the sword of the Spirit and did not tilt at windmills. It is ungracious, at this late date, with Calvinism (the error the pioneers opposed) on the rise, for anyone to promote fellowship with the very people Campbell and others fought. Much less is it gracious for those in non-institutional churches (sound preachers) today to parrot these unfounded charges against Campbell and Brents, using the same faulty definitions of gospel and doctrine as they relate to the word of the cross. The only thing “distorted and anemic” in this context is the fact that some will not preach the word of the cross in the biblical sense, being “ashamed” (Rom. 1:16) of the full proclamation as too negative, too legalistic, too unloving. Allen should not be too lonely in his ivory tower or tilting at windmills.
Non Sequitur: Covenant or Contract
In no other place of his book does Allen reveal his ignorance of the Bible more than when he contrasts covenant (gospel) and contract (doctrine). He charged that under Campbell (and others) “the gospel of grace became a gospel of duty, law, and perfect obedience. Covenant, we might say became contract. . . Consider the difference between covenant and contract. Though similar in some ways, they differ radically in spirit. A contract defines a precise set of relationships and obligations, and if these are correctly observed then the contractual obligations are fully discharged and the benefits fully received.
“But covenant in the biblical sense is far different” (p. 122).
Further, “God’s covenant with people, unlike a contract, always arises out of grace…. Contracts contain little room for slippage. . . God’s covenants, in contrast, always begin with an act of grace . . . because they are rooted in love and trust they contain elements of spontaneous giving and forgiving” (pp. 122, 123). It is difficult to know where to begin to correct such monstrous error.
True, the Law of Moses was a contract that required perfect obedience to merit salvation (Gal. 3:100, but faithful obedience was never condemned (cf: life of Abraham, Gen. 15:6; Rom. 4:1 ff; etc.). The Law of Moses was also a covenant (Deut. 29:1; Jer. 31:31f; Heb. 8:8; 10:16; Exod. 24:3-10) that was a gift of God’s grace. On the other hand, the gospel of Christ is a law (Rom. 8:1-3; James 1:25), defining “a precise set of relationships and obligations” (Matt. 7:21; 2 John 9-11; 1 John 5:3).
We are under law today. It is no less law because it incorporates grace and forgiveness (Rom. 8:1-3). It is different from the Law of Moses in that it does not require perfection (provision for forgiveness implies sin, 1 John 1). Grace and law justification are mutually exclusive; but grace and obedience to the Law of Christ (gospel and doctrine) are inclusive of each other.
Brother Allen betrays his lack of knowledge even further by quoting from K. C. Moser (The Way of Salvation). Moser advocated Calvinism regarding the imputation of righteousness, the very thing Campbell, Stone, Brents and others were fighting to destroy. By quoting from Moser and his Calvinism (p. 123), Allen manifests ignorance as to the necessity of the Restoration battles and intimates his own Calvinist leanings. Had Leonard Allen lived during the Restoration era, he would, no doubt, have been on the opposite side from Campbell and those who were studying themselves out of Calvinistic error.
Non Sequitur: Spirit of the Age
By this time we should know that it is impossible to defeat the secularization of the world without the full message of the New Testament. The good news about Jesus’ deity, alone, will not suffice. It is impossible for one to be converted to Christ and to be motivated to godly living and self-denial without a knowledge of the “whole counsel.” When Paul wrote to Timothy, he spoke of doctrine which is “according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God” (1 Tim. 1:8-11). The doctrines of this gospel included the truth about the lawless and insubordinate, unholy and profane, murderers, fornicators, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, etc. While some might be too timid to preach like Paul, you can be sure that he preached the gospel. When Paul stood before Felix and spoke concerning “the faith in Christ,” he “reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” (Acts 24:24-25). That is gospel preaching, “word of the cross” preaching, “core gospel” preaching and “doctrinal” preaching, one and the same. Gospel and doctrine are mutually inclusive; they are equally related to the sinner’s salvation and the saint’s edification.
Conclusion
This is not an exhaustive review of the errors made by brother Allen in The Cruciform Church. Such a review would require a line-by-line examination. What has been listed is supplied as a warning that faithful preachers should not be put on the defensive by charges that we are guilty of not preaching enough about the cross of Christ. Some conservative preachers are already parroting this line, inadvertently lending credence to this foolishness. Dangerous consequences are sure to follow when we incorporate unscriptural language in our writing and preaching. It is misleading, to say the least; divisive, at the worst. If we don’t want to be identified with these men and go where they are going, let’s don’t be guilty of duplicating their material. Likewise, it is a warning against falling prey to yet another fallacious distinction between gospel/doctrine, this one called cross/doctrine. Compromisers will never be comfortable under the scrutiny of the whole counsel of God. Let us not give them the edge by defining biblical terminology so as to bring doctrinal preaching into disfavor.
Those who love unity in diversity and who want to broaden the borders of fellowship with error will love this book. It has an air of scholarship and religiosity that will provide just the right touch. We urge all who read it to read carefully, with a Bible at their side “for we are not ignorant of the Devil’s devices” (2 Cor. 2:11).
Guardian of Truth XXXVIII: 24, p. 6-8
December 15, 1994
December 15, 1994
Discussion at University Church of Christ
Tampa, Florida
Date: January 25, 1972
Speakers: Carl Ketcherside, Robert Turner, Harry Pickup, Jr.,
Ferrell Jenkins, Bob Owen
Original Recording by H. E. Phillips and Tom O’Neal
Transcribed by Tom Roberts, August-September, 2005
Accuracy of Transcription checked by Tom O’Neal, September, 2005
(this document is stored in MS Word format, if you do not have Word installed, use the “download viewers” link to download a viewer for MS Word)
Busy-ness
One of the eternal struggles of the Lord’s disciples is to learn and practice a proper balance between the affairs of this life and the affairs of the kingdom of heaven. What we often feel we need is many times just something we want and the kingdom of heaven is left lacking of our time and talents while we spend these in carnal pursuits. One of the crying needs of our day is to learn to put the Lord’s work first (Matthew 6:33). We must be busy, of course, but we must learn the difference between working for “food that perisheth” and “food that abideth unto eternal life” (John 6:27). As I say, there is a balance in these matters and we must learn it or be found wanting.The Bible does not condemn Christians engaging in business enterprises. In fact, examples abound which show disciples of the Lord practicing different forms of business. Matthew was a tax collector, Lydia a seller of purple, some of the apostles fishermen, and Jesus Himself certainly knew the carpentry business. The “worthy woman” of Proverbs 31 made and sold fine linen garments to the merchants. In addition to these examples of industry by faithful people, we may add the scriptures that censure those who would not “provide for his own” (1 Timothy 5:8) or who refuse to “labor with his hands” (Ephesians 4:28).