The Fading Fear

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The cold snows of division in the higher peaks are beginning to melt. The spring thaw is starting and the first gentle rivulets are commencing to trickle downward, skirting the boulders and other obstacles and finding their way toward that unity which some day will become a broad and placid river. The heirs of the restoration movement are beginning to think in terms of oneness rather than of divisiveness.

     It was almost a century ago that our fathers in a frontier culture, many of them uneducated and illiterate, possessed of quick tempers and touchy pride, began to splinter and fragment a movement which began so auspiciously as "a project to unite the Christians in all of the sects." The first cleavage was the signal for others to follow, and the sin of schism with its sectarian segregation and isolation became a way of life for thousands.

     The first rupture ruined the restoration movement as an effective force for unity. Subsequent fractures intensified the confusion and multiplied the problems. From the first day that I began writing about healing the breaches, I have emphasized that we must go back to the first ghastly laceration and repair it, or it would stand as a monument to our inconsistency and mock us for our hypocrisy. At that time there seemed little hope that any consideration would be given to my plea.

     I was hailed as a visionary, attacked as a liberal and branded as a traitor. Since I anticipated all of this I could say that "none of these things move me and neither count I my life dear unto myself." I have always felt that the brethren whom I love would someday recognize the futility of preaching unity and practicing partition. Now that faith is being realized.

     More than two years ago a meeting of top-level men in the Churches of Christ was held in an eastern city with a prominent brother from the Christian Church. It was agreed that these leaders in the non-instrument ranks would tone down the factional approach in their articles and broadcasts, eliminating such material as would intensify tensions between the two groups. No mention of the meeting ever leaked out to orthodox journals but the effect has been seen from coast to coast.

     In New York, the Manhattan Church of Christ entered into "the fellowship of giving and receiving" with an important and wealthy Christian Church family. In California, across the nation, the administration of Pepperdine College reached the conclusion that the use of the instrument was no barrier to fellowship in Christ Jesus. Since that time, the president and vice-president have both spoken at the North American Christian Convention,

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hailing those in attendance as their brethren. One of them made an address on the campus of a Christian Church school, and the other addressed a banquet of friends and alumni of the same institution. Both made it clear that they recognized they were among the children of God.

     A front-rank man in the Bible department at Abilene Christian College recently said that if the instrument was being introduced now, the brethren who oppose it would look at it a long time before they would divide over it. This is a clear-cut admission that the division has cultural overtones and it is now time for the Bible department at Abilene to take a second look at its role in condoning and continuing a division which was sinful in the first place.

     A ranking professor at another college told one of his good friends, who is also a good friend of mine (but secretly for fear of the Jews), "Carl is right about fellowship and has been all along, and if he had come up in the right group, he would be headlining every lectureship program in the brotherhood." In the face of such an admission I'm not sure it is much of an honor to speak at a lectureship, and I am very grateful to God that I did not "come up in the right group."

     I hail with genuine pleasure every attempt of brethren to meet and discuss our sinful schism. Such a meeting took place in a southern city several months back, and the proceedings were all conducted in an amiable fashion. One of the ironic twists of fate is that present for the occasion was my esteemed brother, James DeForest Murch, who has lived down his detractors on both sides, and is now able to meet with men who once heaped opprobrium upon him for working on what was known as the Witty-Murch plan for unity.

     The brethren who oppose the instrument agreed to work for lessening of the tensions on the mission field where the question is not even an issue. They also disclaimed any intention of becoming involved in public partisan debate over the matter. They conversed and prayed together in a spirit of harmony and fraternity, and parted with a mutual resolution to promote other such meetings on an expanding scale in the future.

     This points up one great phenomenon which must not be ignored. Brethren can treat each other with decency, politeness and even affection, on the street, in public eating places, in private homes and in motels. It is only when they get into their church buildings that they clam up and retreat into the deep-freeze posture. There is a psychological reason for this. Our meetinghouses have become symbols of our partisan loyalties, bastions of orthodoxy, and citadels of the status quo. Outside of their walls we approach one another with cool heads and warm hearts, inside of them we resort to cold hearts and hot heads. If all of our temples of party pride were burned down we could get together in a month. This is merely an observation, and not to be taken as a suggestion.

     We must face up to the fact that a great many preachers and professors in Christian Colleges now realize that it was wrong and sinful to divide over instrumental music and the millennial question. They are undergoing inner trauma because they would like to speak out plainly and say so. They are caught in a vise which they helped to construct. They have taught the brethren to be bitter and sectarian in attitude, and they are afraid of the legalistic monster which they have created. Their prestige, salaries and jobs depend upon keeping still about their real sentiments. They have a lot to lose.

     I can sympathize with them and have compassion upon them. I was as narrow and factional as any of them. I regarded as faithful only those who were attached to our little party. All others were "brothers in error," to be stigmatized, scandalized and humiliated. I taught the members of our splinter group that they alone were loyal to Christ and that they should dwell in unsullied isolation to save the truth. But when the blessed Spirit of God opened my eyes to the realization that what we called righteousness was simply damnable self-righteousness, I

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openly and publicly renounced the whole sick and sordid mess.

     Church of Christism is no better than any other "ism." It is parochial, provincial and sectarian. I am ashamed of the bigotry and intolerance which once enveloped my heart and caused me to turn the cold shoulder upon good brethren whose only sin was that they could not in pure conscience see everything as I did and bow the knee to our unwritten creeds. I am astounded that I could have been so brain-washed while proclaiming the grace of God to others. I have no intention to conceal the fact that such a schismatic course was a sin against my Lord and against His body.

     My frightened brethren are choosing a different course. They are resolved to play down the troublesome questions of the past and allow them to gradually pale into insignificance and fade into the dusk of coming ages. They realize that these trifling issues will be eclipsed by the greater and more burning problems of a secular age. They will take no chances. They will rock no brotherhood boats. I do not doubt that they will achieve a measure of success. I only pray that their silence is truly golden, and not merely yellow.

     But I do not have time to wait. I must repair the breaches my fathers made, and seek to undo the sectarian attitude which I helped to promote, and do it now. "I must work while it is called today, for the night cometh when no man can work." I am compelled by an inner sense of urgency, a compulsion which will not be stilled. The way to unite is to unite! After all the conferences have been held and the bone-weary negotiators have completed their awesome studies of "ham on the Lord's table" and "gopher wood in the ark" in relation to instrumental music, the only way they can unite is to unite. I am starting where they will be ending! I have fiddled away too much of my life already. I have no more to waste!

     I trust, therefore, that I will not be thought presumptuous in suggesting the following steps which I think our brethren ought to take if they expect to seriously attempt to answer the prayer of Jesus for all who believe in Him through the apostolic testimony. I especially commend them to my brother and fellow-editor, Reuel Lemmons, who is in the forefront of arranging for Church of Christ participants in the dialogue sessions.

     I think it is rather useless to get together to exchange the same old tired clichés and parrot the moss-covered stereotyped expressions. We need a new approach, a bold approach, one that will challenge us all with its freshness. It was just such an approach which gave the restoration movement birth. It is such an approach which will revive it in power in our cynical society.

     1. Let us freely admit our error in equating the restoration movement with the kingdom of heaven. That kingdom has always existed and did not need to be restored. Restoration is an approach toward solving the problems of schism in the body, and the restoration movement is not the body of Christ moving exclusively in this fashion and through its adherents only, but it is a movement within that body.

     We have employed the term "Church of Christ" in a sectarian sense, and when we use the expression "the Lord's church" to designate those only who are members of a faction, segment or movement, we sectarianize it. Even if we bring together all of the dissident parties in the restoration movement, we have not yet achieved the unity of all God's people. We will only have made the restoration movement a more effective agent in working toward that end.

     God has children whose names are not found on the roster or in the directory of any Christian Church or Church of Christ. Certainly they are members of the body of Christ and it is the church of Christ. But the term church of Christ as God sees it embraces many more people than are embraced in the term as employed in the Gospel Advocate or Firm Foundation, and all of God's children are my brothers and sisters. And I do mean all of them!

     2. Let the non-instrument brethren

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openly admit that our fathers were wrong when they made a test of fellowship out of instrumental music, and created a non- instrument party or sect. This has nothing to do with the right or wrong of instrumental music. Certainly one could not say it was right to use it if he thought it was wrong to do so. But it is a sin to "set at nought a brother" for whom Christ died, over such matters, and we need to quit pussyfooting around and say so out loud.

     All of the sparring and fencing around over whether psallo includes plucking or twanging on something while you are singing is beside the point when it comes to fellowship in Christ Jesus. Lambasting each other with lexicons and pasting each other with patristics may be a good diversion for those who have time for it. But whatever the final decision is when the referee sounds the last whistle, cannot alter the fact that we are brothers now in one body by baptism, and we are charged with maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

     We need to rise above that species of petulant partisanship which causes us to jockey around for a favorable concession from "the other side" so we can appear justified. This is childish, frivolous and silly. We inherited a factional set-up, we supported and defended it. It was a sin to start such a faction, it is a sin to perpetuate it. Let's say so. Never mind whether other factionists evade the issue or face up to it. Let us free ourselves from the short-sighted sophistry into which we have been betrayed by tradition. I do not favor the use of instrumental music in the praise service of the community of saints, but I shall not allow the devil to motivate me to use this to try and club my brothers into conformity, or drive them from me.

     3. Let us candidly concede that we have betrayed the original restoration ideal as enounciated by Thomas Campbell in "The Declaration and Address." To try and make it appear that we are upholding that ideal while making tests of fellowship out of such things as instrumental music or the millennium, exhibits either a deep-seated ignorance or blatant hypocrisy. Nothing can be clearer than proposition six in the "Declaration." Here it is.

     "That although inferences and deductions from Scripture premises, when fairly inferred, may be truly called the doctrine of God's holy word, yet they are not formally binding upon the consciences of Christians further than they perceive the connection, and evidently see that they are so, for their faith must not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power and veracity of God. Therefore no such deductions can be made terms of communion, but properly do belong to the after and progressive edification of the Church. Hence it is evident that no such deductions or inferential truths ought to have any place in the Church's confession."

     For years I made deductions and what I conceived of as inferential truths part of the church's confession, or unwritten creed. During that time I spoke fervently about the efforts of the pioneers of the restoration movement, but I was wholly ignorant of the platform of that movement. I had not even read "The Declaration and Address." All I knew about it was what other preachers in the faction said about it, and a lot of them had not read it either. We were learnedly professing to defend something about which we were almost wholly ignorant.

     When I finally read "The Declaration and Address" and saw what a noble document it was, and how far I had missed even the basic principles which it spelled out, I became convicted of the sin of factionalism and sought to clear my heart of the whole sordid mess of inept and inconsistent reasoning which was equated with loyalty by the party chieftains. The party spirit makes for dishonesty and breeds arrogance and self-righteousness.

     Our position on instrumental music is a deduction from Scripture premises. One need not be profound to see that. The same holds true for our interpretation of the millennium. Granted that what we believe is a truth (and both sides firmly believe they have the truth), it is an inferential truth, and neither can bind it upon the other as a term of fellowship.

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     Let us admit that we have sinned in creating separatist parties over such things as instrumental music, cups, classes, colleges, and the rest of the catalogue of issues over which we have stultified ourselves and caused the rest of the religious world to regard us as magnifiers of the minute and crucifiers of the concrete. We can hang up charts from now until Jesus comes, and devise arguments that are complex and intricate, but when the gong sounds to end the struggle, whatever we have said about instrumental music will have been a deduction and an inferential truth.

     I do not intend to sit around on the fence twiddling my thumbs and wait while the party "somewhats" continue their puerile palavering and their legalistic lacing of one another. I am through with all of the factional huddles and higgledy-piggledy. My brothers are my brothers. All of them are. It is just that simple. Whatever they think about instrumental music or the millennium, or about cups, classes or colleges, they are still my brothers. I am in the one body with them. I am united with them through the one Spirit. And I shall recognize them as my brothers in the Lord.

     In the encounter between the select representatives of the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, the former asked the latter what they thought of me and of my work. The Texans who were present hastened to say that I was too liberal. And measured by their standard I think that I am. I just do not believe that any orthodox faction in the restoration movement is the Lord's church to the exclusion of all others. I do not believe that all of them together exhaust the possibilities of God's grace. I do not believe the restoration movement is the whole body of Christ on earth. I no longer defend any party, splinter, sect or segment as the one holy, catholic and apostolic church of God upon earth. That is what these men mean when they say I am too liberal. I will not be confined in my love for God's children by any arbitrary and authoritative fence which men construct.

     For this, of course, I am branded as liberal, and I thank God and take courage, for at last I am a free man, free in Christ to serve all of my brothers without fear or favor. My allegiance is to the risen Lord, my Comforter is the Holy Spirit, my brethren are all those who have been born from above. Not for all this world contains would I again barter the grace of God for the favor of men. It is a thrilling experience to look back and recognize one's errors, and be empowered to confess openly, "I was mistaken," and never worry what men can do to you. I have been set free by the grace of God. I shall never again wear the yoke of partisan bondage!