My Only Creed

An address delivered at the Sixth Annual Unity Forum, Atlanta, Georgia, July 2,1971

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Perhaps nothing is more repugnant to civilized man than the thought of cannibalism. The dictionary defines a cannibal as "a human who eats human flesh," and cannibalism as "the eating of one's own kind."

     In the month of May, 1845, when Great Britain was all agog with interest for exploring the Arctic Region and discovering the Northwest Passage, Sir John Franklin sailed away in command of two vessels, the Erebus and the Terror. They disappeared, and sparked a search which lasted into the twentieth century.

     In 1848, Dr. John Rae, of the Hudson's Bay Company, relayed information which he had gained from Eskimos, that a band of white men had died from starvation on King Edward's Island. They had sold him what appeared to be relics of the Franklin expedition. Dr. Rae conscientiously reported that the Eskimos had informed him that members of the party had been reduced to cannibalism.

     This aroused a furor in London. Distinguished writers such as Charles Dickens and Wilikie Collins blasted the report as a slur upon the honor of the Royal Navy. Lady Franklin opposed payment of the ten thousand pounds which had been offered by the government for information as to the fate of the explorers. She launched a privately financed expedition to probe the Arctic wastes to prove that the slander was not true.

     Scores of brilliant men and women backed her endeavor. It was unthinkable to them that men, reared in the graces of civility and polished by the sheen of society could ever stoop to the consumption of human flesh. It was as late as 1922 that Knud Rasmussen "conclusively proved the truth of Rae's revelation of cannibalism, by discovering at Starvation Cove the skeletons of Europeans with the bones cut by saws and the skulls broken to extract the brains."

     Now if physical cannibalism is repulsive, consider what a terrifying thing it is for brethren to engage in such a practice spiritually. It is this which prompts Paul to condemn the use of liberty as an occasion for the flesh, and to add, "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another." The New Testament in Plain English translates the passage, "But if you bite and eat up one another, take care that you are not destroyed by one another." It is unthinkable that those whose banner is inscribed with the words, "Brotherly Love," should engage in destroying one another. Yet the sin of cannibalism lies at the door of many who profess to be children of God.

     What is even worse is that we are treated to the sight of a body of believers insanely attacking its own members and tearing with bloody talons at its own tissue. One cannot help but recall the Greek fable of Erisichthon, the profane person and hater of the gods. As the poets related the story, Erisichthon defied the gods by attacking with his axe a venerable oak in a grove sacred to Ceres. When a bystander remonstrated, Erisichthon hacked him to pieces and cut off his head.

     When news of this impiety reached Ceres, she decided upon a punishment so dire as to make all shudder who heard it. She dispatched an Oread into the farthest reaches of ice-clad Scythia to summon the dread Famine to take possession of the bowels of Erisichthon. Finding him asleep, she enfolded him with her wings and breathed herself into him, infusing her poison into his veins. He awoke with a raging hunger, and loudly cried for food which he consumed as soon as it was brought. All that he owned he sold to purchase food, but his dreadful appetite was not abated.

     At length, with nothing left to barter, he sold his daughter, but this did not

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provide enough food, and finally hunger forced him to devour his own limbs, and he strove to sustain his body by devouring it, until death relieved him from the sentence pronounced by the vengeful Ceres. This myth is older than our gospel records, but it serves to depict the state of the body of believers which I have known since childhood. That body has sought to protect, perpetuate and propagate itself through self-destruction. It has severed its own members, gouged out its own eyes, cut out its own tongue and fragmented itself in many communities. And it has done this under the guise of upholding the truth.

     What has happened is very clear to the astute student. We were "a search and rescue mission" intended to locate the Christians in all of the sects and to guide them back to the base of unity and peace. But we became entangled in the jungle, and motivated by fear of our own shadows and unable to distinguish between friend and foe. Now we need to be rescued from our plight. We are more schismatic, more divided, and less at peace than those whom we set out to unite.

     What is the remedy for our state? Unless we have abandoned the ideal of restoration it is very simple. When our nineteenth century predecessors saw the frightful divisions existing in the Protestant establishment, they knew that "the correction and improvement of no creed, or partisan establishment in Christendom could ever become the basis of such a union, communion and cooperation, as would restore peace to a church militant against itself, or triumph to the common salvation." Accordingly, they recommended that men cease to emphasize their creeds, ignore their partisan establishments and return to the original order.

     If this advice was the answer for the sectarianism of others, why is it not the solution for our own? I contend that it is not only the answer but it is the only answer. We must go back, back, back--beyond every unwritten creed, every test of union and communion which we have devised--back to a creed of such transcendent importance that the very issue of eternal life is suspended upon its acceptance, a creed of such universal dynamic as to arouse again the gleam of hope in the faded eyes of despairing men floundering in the garbage polluted waters of a sectarian sea.

     So long as we continue to toy with the forlorn daydream that we can elevate our puny parties to the status of the kingdom of heaven, or smuggle into the throne room an illegitimate child of our own begetting, which we have cleverly christened "the Lord's church," we are merely constructing a fool's paradise and building castles in the air. If we are unwilling to divest ourselves of our own sectarian creeds and formulae, we should never again raise a voice of criticism against our religious neighbors who tenaciously cling to their human dogmas.

     Those who are willing to begin at a certain point in our divided state and freeze all division which occurred before, and go on from there, are simply deceiving themselves. They are not opposed to division in the body of our Lord. They only deplore separation from themselves. No one who accepts a certain amount of schism as normal can ever truly labor for the union of all believers in Christ Jesus.

     Those who want to start in at the point of division falsely attributed to instrumental music, and strive to unite all of the warring factions in the non-instrument ranks, are not seeking for the unity of the body of Christ, but for the pacific continuance of a non-instrument party or sect. And if every warring tribe which went forth to battle under a standard bearing the caption, "Vocal Music," agreed to bury the hatchet and smoke the calumet, this would not mean that the ekklesia of God was united. Indeed, if peace were restored to all of the heirs of the restoration movement it would not mean that the one body was now united, for the body of Christ is greater than any movement within it, and greater even than the restoration movement.

     What is the foundation upon which

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we can unite our scattered forces, and then offer it to the religious world as the basis upon which we can build to answer the prayer of our precious Lord? What was proposed at the very outset of the Way, antedating all forms and ceremonies, and preceding all speculative and partisan debates? What can we present to the ecumenical world in our day which will contribute anything valuable to the search for oneness in the Lord of glory?

     Many men who have grown weary with the attempt to unravel the tangled skeins of our own sectarian involvements have given up. They have argued and debated, fought and struggled, only to find conditions growing steadily worse. They despair of ever bringing order out of the complicated snarl, and have resigned themselves to continuing to stolidly slog along in the partisan path. They are bone-tired of the effort to argue out every angle of every wrangle, and adjust every action of every faction. What they forget is that this is not now, and never was the way to attain oneness.

     In an ancient city of Phrygia, an oracle decreed to the populace that their next king would arrive in a wagon. At this very time, a poor country man, Gordius, with his wife and son, was driving his wagon toward the marketplace. He was wildly acclaimed and made king. Gordius sacrificed his oxen, dedicated his wagon to the deity of the oracle, and tied it in place with a large fast knot. A tradition developed that whoever untied the knot would be lord of all Asia. Many tried agonizingly to undo it, working their fingers to the bone. When Alexander the Great came to Phyrgia he also tried, but becoming impatient, he drew his sword and cut the knot with one swift stroke. We must take the sword of the Spirit and cut through the intricate involvements of our own sectarianism. This I have done in my own heart and for my own life. I have no time for nit-picking and playing tiddly-winks inside of our partisan pillboxes. There is nothing noble about storming molehills which warped vision and defective eyesight have elevated to mountainous status.

     Our Lord did not agonize on Calvary to purchase with his precious blood a mere party to defend to the death a position on cups or classes. The prophets of old did not endure stoning and torture, looking forward to a Golden Age when men, quoting their words for authority, would spill fratricidal blood upon forensic battlefronts, striving over an opinion as to the meaning of the millennium, or the place of music in the presentation of praise to the Prince of peace.

     There is only one creed endorsed by heaven as the basis of union and communion for the saints of God. There has never been another, and there never will be another! It is not related to human opinion, doctrinal deduction, or mental apprehension of an apostolic epistle. That creed is not a precept, but a person. Reduced to a proposition as a statement of faith, it is simply that "Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God."

     When one believes this proposition with all of his heart, he believes all that God has ever required of any man, insofar as personal faith is related to salvation from sin. This is the divinely enunciated creed, and when one presents himself to me, professing his confidence in this as a fact, I am obligated to immerse him into that glorious new relationship signified by the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

     I dare not create myself a one-man papal inquisitor, and probe his thinking as related to any theological speculation or philosophical opinion. Whether he deduces that Jesus will return before the millennium, or following it, or whether he has ever heard of the millennium, is none of my concern. He may know nothing about the thousand year reign.

     Whatever opinion he may hold with regard to the means for propagandizing the world with the gospel is none of my business. There is a world of difference between receiving and accepting the Good News as saving truth, and speculat-

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ing as to the best method for disseminating it to a world lying in wickedness.

     God has not authorized me to set up an immigration bureau and a customs office at the border of the kingdom of heaven, and demand that all of the weary pilgrims open up their mental baggage and expose their thoughts and concepts for my haughty and arrogant inspection. No one will be debarred from divine acceptance simply because of my obstinate refusal to stamp the approval of a self-important faction upon some article of rationalization. Everyone who has the passport of faith will be admitted exactly as I was allowed to enter, bringing along a motley assortment of mental notions and fancies, with which all of us must toy as we strive toward maturity. God does not demand that we divest ourselves of all our souvenirs and playthings in order to be his children, even though others of his children may see no significance in them.

     Many of our brethren have rejected the compassion of Jesus for the conformity of Procrustes. This legendary tyrant, whose name means "The Stretcher," set up his iron bedstead near Eleusis, in Attica. Every person who passed by was forced to become a victim for his torture. They were made to lie down upon the bed and, if they were too short for it, they were hammered or stretched to fit. If they were too long they were cut down to proper length. But Procrustes was captured and slain by Theseus, who inflicted upon him the same torture that Procrustes had imposed upon his victims, cutting him down to fit the bed. The most frightening utterance of Jesus for many of our brethren, should be, "For as you judge others, so you will yourselves be judged, and whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt back to you."

     I want to make my own position clear. I want to do so now! I want my generation to know exactly where I stand. My creed is Jesus Christ! My basis of union is Jesus Christ! My test of fellowship is Jesus Christ! My criterion for communion is Jesus Christ! I have no other creed, and I want no other. I reject here and now, once and for all, any plea for unity based upon conformity to any metaphysical or philosophic deductions, or predicated upon the universal acceptance of any speculation or opinion elevated to doctrinal dogma. I care not one whit more for the unwritten creeds which have produced our particular parties than I do for the more formal ones which have spawned the sects.

     I would as soon try to enter heaven with the Nicene Creed clutched in my hand as a possible passport to glory, as to try to pry open the gates of pearl with one of the unwritten "Church of Christ" creeds as a tool. But every man should have a justifiable reason for adoption of the creed upon which he bases his hope of relationship with the Father and the Son, and I am no exception.

     My reason is very simple. I respect the Bible as God's word. I receive it without quirk or quibble. It is my only rule of faith and practice. I simply accept it as of divine origin, and seek to implement its disclosures in my own life and conduct. And I hold that the very core of revealed saving truth is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that this fact, substantiated by the best testimony available unto man, is the foundation upon which the community of the reconciled ones is built, and that there is no other foundation which man can lay!

     1. This was the countersign of the rule of heaven among men, announced personally by the Father of mercies. It was the only pronouncement which came as a specific communication from God to mankind in direct conjunction with the mission of Jesus, and the voice came from heaven when Jesus was baptized in the waters of the Jordan. If God did not at this time reveal the foundation of our restored relationship unto Him, then He never did so, and the law of Moses which was inaugurated by his voice from heaven was more auspicious in its origin than the regime of His Son.

     2. This was the abiding principle upon which Jesus declared he would

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constitute the community of "the called-out," and it stands in contrast to whatever other associations and identifications may be attached unto him by men. He is not to be confused with harbinger or prophet, for though their missions may be divine, they are not. The kingdom of heaven is erected upon the divinity of Jesus. This is the most sublime truth of all ages. When one stands upon it he is grounded in that against which the very gates of Hades are helpless and impotent.

     3. This is the one foundation which has been laid for the unity of the saints. When Paul wrote to the fragmented and splintered believers in Corinth, his first great question was "Is Christ divided?" The second was a corollary to it. "Was Paul crucified for you?" Jesus is undivided and indivisible. No other man, not even a father in the gospel, can supplant Jesus as the basis of hope. When the apostle wrote, "There can be no other foundation beyond that which is already laid; I mean Jesus Christ himself," he was still talking about the cure for disunity among the brethren.

     The foundation of the temple of God is a person, the Son of God. He is not only the Alpha, but he is the Omega. There is no one before him. There is no one after him. There is no other foundation beyond. "What think you of Christ? whose Son is he?" This is the universal question for mankind. It is the criterion of spiritual involvement with the Eternal One. If one is right about Jesus, he can be wrong about many other things and still be saved. If he is wrong about Jesus, he can be right about everything else and still be lost.

     4. This was the burden of the Good News proclaimed by the chosen envoys of the King, when they were sent forth into an alien world. One of them wrote, "As for me, brothers, when I came to you, I declared the attested truth of God without display of fine words or wisdom. I resolved that while I was with you I would think of nothing but Jesus Christ-- Christ nailed to the cross." Nothing but Jesus Christ! He wrote again, "Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the Gospel; and to do it without relying on the language of worldly wisdom, so that the fact of Christ on his cross might have its full weight."

     What does this mean? It means that God has proposed to unite all who believe in Jesus, upon the basis of one great universal fact, a fact demonstrated and proven in the context of human history, a fact substantiated by credible human witnesses and by the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. It means that the one foundation of union and communion for the saints is Jesus, the Son of God, the personal embodiment of truth, and not some truths, or certain truths, not even those uttered by Jesus.

     The kingdom of light is a kingdom of faith, and faith has to do with facts, not with abstract truths. All facts are true, but not all truths are facts. One who accepts him who is the truth, thereby commits himself to the acceptance of all truths as they become known to him, but such truths can never become the basis of union, else our faith must stand in the developing wisdom of men and not in the eternal power of God.

     The basis of our unity in Christ Jesus is not a compilation of propositions deduced from the scriptures by speculative theologians. It is not a formal code of morals or ethics drawn up in a conclave or convention. It is not even the sacred scriptures of the new covenant themselves. The saints were united before one apostolic epistle was ever written, and even now one may be relatively ignorant of the content of these letters and still be in Christ Jesus.

     No personal experience of one in Christ, whether such experience is real or fancied, can ever become the criterion of fellowship in the Lord of glory. No one can impose such a personal experience upon another as a test of faith or worthiness, and no one can be deposed for testifying to such a personal experience. Those who seek to bind in all such cases show that they have another creed than Christ, and all who build their hopes alone upon personal experiences

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and phenomena are doomed to eventual disillusionment. It is only when an experience draws us closer to the heart of Jesus that it possesses any validity. It is Jesus who makes our relationship to any concept, happening, or experience valid, and not an experience which makes the relationship to Jesus a valid one.

     Our relationship to Jesus stems from faith and not from knowledge or personal experience. Faith has to do with testimony, and testimony has to do with fact. The beloved apostle wrote that Jesus did a multitude of signs in the presence of his disciples. They saw them and knew that they were real. Out of this treasure of signs, the Spirit selected a number, and the very type, which would produce faith in any honest heart. These have been recorded, and they were written down that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and by believing this, we might have life in him. This is the life-giving fact. It is the only one. Other truths may strengthen us and stimulate us, but they cannot produce life. It is unfortunate that many of our brethren cannot distinguish between life and a stimulant.

     Our problem in this age is that we have lost Christ in the Bible, we have lost the Bible in the church, and we have lost the church in the world. We must now rescue Jesus from the Bible or become like the scribes and Pharisees to whom Jesus said, "You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life, but their purpose is to testify of me. And you will not come unto me that you might have life."

     Life does not come from searching the scriptures. The scriptures do not produce eternal life. The scriptures are a gift from God just as life is a gift from God. We have confused the love letters with the Lover; the Captain of our salvation with his orders; the fodder with the Shepherd; and the prescription with the Physician. We have eclipsed the Son of God with the wisdom of the sons of men. And by worshiping the scriptures instead of the Savior we often end up with a head full of quotations and a heart empty of Jesus. Christianity is not Jesus pointing us to a book, but a book pointing us to Jesus. The prodigal could have been preoccupied with a road map and remained in the pig pen!

     We must recover the Bible from the church. The people of God have carried the word of God captive. Once more the book of God has been lost in the temple of God. It has been buried beneath a pile of partisan practices, cultural customs, institutional inventions, doctrinal deductions and sectarian sham. And we must reclaim the church from the world, not by taking it out of the world, but by taking the world out of it. These last two objectives will never be achieved until we accomplish the first. Jesus must again be crowned in our hearts as he has been coronated in heaven. Jesus the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God, and Lord of life. This is my creed, and upon it I propose to meet every other soul upon this earth who is willing to commit himself to it. In closing I ask you to hear this from the pen of Alexander Campbell:

     "When the Messiah appeared as the founder of a new religion, systems of religion consisting of opinions and speculation upon matter and mind, upon God and nature, upon virtue and vice, had been adopted, improved, reformed, and exploded, time after time. That there was always something superfluous, something defective; something wrong, something that could be improved, in every system of religion and morality, was generally felt, and at last was universally acknowledged. But the grandeur, sublimity, and beauty of the foundation of hope, and of ecclesiastical or social union, established by the author and founder of Christianity, consisted in this,--that the belief of one fact, and that upon the best evidence in the world, is all that is requisite, as far as faith goes, to salvation. The belief of this one fact, and submission to one institution expressive of it, is all that is required of Heaven to admission into the church...The one fact is expressed in a single proposi-

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tion--that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah...The one institution is baptism into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."