The Scotch Influence
W. Carl Ketcherside
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I think there are few other places I have ever been where the winter can be as cold and blustery as it is in Scotland. It was my lot, the first time I went over to visit the gracious saints who live in that marvelous land of the heather, to arrive in one of the worst snowstorms they had experienced in several decades. It was a wonder to behold how they kept the big doubledecker buses operating as efficiently as they did. But they are an efficient and enterprising people and impressed me greatly with their abilities.
One day I left the little colliery village where I was staying and rode into Edinburgh to transfer to another bus which was to take me to a town where the good brethren had arranged to have their anniversary meeting a week early so I might fit it into my schedule and address them.
When I arrived at my destination shortly afternoon the wind was sweeping down in a gale from the Firth of Forth and the snow was swirling about so heavily that it was impossible to see even ten feet. When I arrived at the home of my congenial host the cup of hot tea which was waiting was more than welcome. It was such a nasty day outside that it was suggested I stay in the living-room close by the ingle, the little fireplace where the coals were glowing cheerily and sending out waves of warmth.
A large bookcase in the room was filled with bound volumes of brotherhood journals from days gone by--the British Millennial Harbinger, the Ecclesiastical Observer, Bible Advocate, and Old Paths. I settled down to an afternoon of trying to assimilate all that I could from volumes of which I had heard, but had never before seen. That evening before we went out to wade the drifts to the little old-world meetinghouse, the elderly brother came in to tell me he wanted me to select a volume of each of the papers to have as a souvenir of my visit.
Years have passed away and the brother who was so kind has long since departed to be with Jesus. But even yet when the wind whistles around the eaves and the snow piles up in my driveway, and the birds huddle in the evergreens, I go to my own shelves and take down one of the books brought from a land so far away, and when I settle down to read the well-marked pages my heart
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The Bible Advocate and Precursor of Unity, as it was called, was a pocket-size paperback published on Paternoster Row in London. It was "devoted to the restoration of original Christianity" according to the sub-title, and one of my favorites is the 1847 edition, now more than 125 years old. It carries a running account of the visit of Alexander Campbell to England and Scotland, written from the British viewpoint. It also presents two relatively long articles by Campbell. One is on creeds and the other on the Holy Spirit. Both are excellent samples of some of the most poignant writing in the history of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
I acknowledge a great debt for the impression made upon my own feeble consciousness by the dissertation on creeds. Campbell recognized that the divine foundation upon which Jesus erected his spiritual edifice was a confession expressing but two ideas, both of which were related to the person and office of God's beloved Son. "Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God." When Jesus declared that upon this rock he would establish his community he rejected every other rock or proposition as basic or fundamental to reunion with the Father. This was the divinely-selected and ordained creed.
Campbell wrote, "Here then, is the whole revelation of the mystery of the Christian constitution--the full confession of the Christian faith. All that is peculiar to Christianity is found in these words; not merely in embryo, but in a clearly expressed outline. A clear perception, and a cordial belief of these two facts will make a man a Christian. He may carry them out in their vast dimensions and glorious developments, to all eternity. He may ponder on them until his spirit is transformed into the image of God; until he shines in more than angelic brightness, in all the purity and beauty of heavenly love. Man glorified in heaven, gifted with immortality, and rapt in ecstasies of infinite and eternal blessedness, is but the mere result of a proper apprehension of, and conformity to this confession."
The marks with which I bracketed the statement on that snowy afternoon in Scotland are still there. At the time I did not know where my meditative wrestling with this sublime thought would take me. It was but the first shaft of light from the rising sun, but gradually as it rose higher over my intellectual horizon the shadows began to flee away. I could see clearly that every party among us sprung from another creed, another belief or set of beliefs bound upon men by their fellows as being essential to fellowship here and life hereafter.
In our zeal to make what we thought would be better Christians, we were actually un-Christianizing them. We were laying another foundation than the noble one consisting of faith in the majestic two-fold proposition upon which Jesus said he would constitute the summoned ones, the called-out community. Whatever it is to which one must subscribe mentally and orally to be received into and recognized as worthy of fellowship by any community is the creed of that community. And any community which demands of its communicants as a basis of reception, faith in any other proposition than the Messiah and divine Sonship of Jesus of Nazareth is not the community which Jesus planted. It is built upon a different rock.
This does not mean that none of the members of such a humanly-devised community or sect are in Christ. One can subscribe to an opinion in ignorance and consider it so important as to be a rallying-ground. He can be a member of a party through birth or association as Paul proclaimed himself to be a Pharisee as well as a disciple of the Messiah. But the community built upon an exalted opinion is no more the body of Christ than the sect of the Pharisees was the body of Christ.
Let us take a modern example recognizable to most of the constituency of that branch of the restoration movement
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In his zeal to defend or promote his personal conviction which he regards as scriptural he may convince others of the rightness of his position and they may adopt it. But when they begin to demand that all brethren reach the same conclusion and hold the same opinion as to implication of the scriptures, regardless of personal conscience, as a price for being regarded in the fellowship, they have made an opinion into a creed. Every new creed will create a new party as certainly as the law of cause and effect operates in the universe.
But a party which crystallizes around such a creed is not the community which Jesus planted. Its adherents may give allegiance to Christ, and insofar as they do they are disciples or followers, but one no more needs to be a member of such a party to be in Jesus than he would need to be in the Baptist or Methodist parties to be in Christ. Men need not surrender their opinions in order to have unity. Indeed, they cannot do so, for personal convictions represent our mental and moral values. All they need to do is to cease regarding them as creeds or foundational truths upon which to erect rival parties. To the strife-torn saints in Corinth, Paul wrote, "For other foundation (that is, for unity) can no man lay, than that which has been laid, and that is Jesus Christ."
When it first dawned upon me that I had been promoting unwritten creeds as the basis of partisan existence and aceptance, I could hardly believe it. I fought myself all the way back across the Atlantic Ocean trying to find some loophole to justify my remaining a partisan. One finds security in such a role. He is hidden behind monastic walls and scarcely needs to think. That is actually the most dangerous thing he can do. All of his thinking is done for him. He need only comply mechanically to be honored and respected by those in the party, and hated by those outside of it.
Fortunately God won out in my life and I shall never again build a party or plant a faction, upon any opinion of mine. I will not defend again as a kind of loyalty that spirit which produces factions. Campbell wrote, "Creeds have often operated and their tendency in time of defection is to cast out the good, intelligent, and pure, and retain those of a contrary opinion." He was right. I have seen it happen. I have helped drive out characters more pure and gentle than those we have retained who lifted up their voices in accusation against others who would not lie about their conscience.
Campbell went on to say, "Human creeds have made more heretics than Christians; more parties than reformations; more martyrs than saints; more wars than peace; more hatred than love; more death than life; that they have killed or driven out all the apostles, prophets and reformers, of the church and of the world."
There is nothing wrong with having opinions. There would be something seriously wrong with one who did not have an opinion. Opinions do not divide us. It is only opinions graduated and elevated into dogmata which create schisms. It is then that opinions are forced, driven and pressed until they result in war and strife. And, it is then that opinions become creeds by which to judge the worthiness of others to be received. My brethren in the restoration movement have at least twenty-four unwritten creeds, for every party is based upon a creedal foundation, deny it though they all will. All of this has been done in the name of "loyalty" and every party is the "loyal church" in the sight of its own participants. I have never met a disloyal brother by his own admission.
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I am no longer interested in "lining up" some of God's children on a partisan foundation. I am desperately concerned about having all of God's great family remain together upon the one foundation. The opinions they hold neither frighten nor perturb me until they arrogantly begin to advance them as basic to my relationship to the Father and his other children. Although Campbell is not my hope of eternal life nor my authority in things spiritual, I began this article by mentioning the effect of his writings upon my thoughts. I would mention another statement from his pen which has been valuable to me.
"Amongst Christians there is now, as there was at the beginning, a very great diversity in the knowledge of the Christian institution. There are babes, children, young men, and fathers in Christ now, as well as in the days of the apostle John. This, from the natural gifts of God, from the diversities of age, education, and circumstances, is unavoidable. And would it not be just as rational and as scriptural to excommunicate one another, because our knowledge is less or greater than any fixed measure, as for differences of opinion on matters of speculation?
"Indeed, in most cases where proscriptions and exclusions now occur in this country, the excluded are the most intelligent members of the society; and although no community will accuse a man because he knows more of his Bible than his brethren, and on this account exclude him from their communion; yet this, it is manifest, rather than heresy (of which, however, for consistency's sake, he must be accused,) is, in truth, the real cause of separation."
I do not want to bore you to tears with quotations from men whose thinking has helped to shape my life, but I would like to include one more. Most of us have heard about John Locke, the British philosopher who was born in 1632, and wrote an Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I learned about his paragraph on the true church and read it over and over a number of years ago. I should like to share it with you.
"Since men are so solicitous about the true church, I would only ask them here by the way, if it be not more agreeable to the church of Christ to make the conditions of her communion to consist in such things and such things only as the Holy Spirit has in the holy scriptures declared in express words to be necessary to salvation. I ask, I say, whether this is not more agreeable to the church of Christ than for men to impose their own inventions and interpretations upon others as if they were of divine authority, and to establish by ecclesiastical laws, as absolutely necessary to the profession of Christianity, such things as the holy Scriptures do either not mention or at least not expressly command. Whoever requires those things in order to ecclesiastical communion which Christ does not require in order to life eternal, he may perhaps constitute a society accommodated to his own opinion and his own advantage, but how that can be called the church of Christ which is established upon laws that are not his, and which excludes such persons from its communion as He will one day receive into the Kingdom of heaven, I understand not."
This is but another way of saying what I have constantly affirmed about myself, that I will make nothing a test
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