48

VOICES OF CONCERN

Laurie Hibbett was born in Alexandria, Virginia, the fourth generation of English settlers whose religion was Episcopal with a sprinkling of Quakers. When her father married a Tennessee girl, he agreed to bring his children up in his wife's Church of Christ faith. Mrs. Hibbett was still an infant when her father died and her mother moved to Nashville; from that time forward her history was Church of Christ. She married a graduate of a Church of Christ college; maternal grandfathers on each side were elders.

Although Mrs. Hibbett is now Episcopalian, she says, "I would no more repudiate my Church of Christ sources than would St. Paul his Hebrew culture. Though with St. Paul I found It necessary to press on, forgetting the things of the past, I remain deeply attached to this regional phenomenon and these are the people I claim as most fully my own." Mrs. Hibbett is the author of a charming, widely-read short story entitled, "Fruit in His Season."

The woman was seated alone in a pew near the center of the big Gothic church. The lights had not yet come on and except for herself the church was empty. She was there early in order to think about an essay she was preparing on a serious subject. Why was she, a born and bred member of the Church of Christ, seated here now as an Episcopalian? This was the question she was attempting to answer for herself and her friends.

When she thought of putting her reasons on paper, it seemed to her that there were no words to deal with her former church as gently as the isolation of its members deserved.

"Perhaps all I could say to them would be, 'God loves you.' But I would have to add, 'Reach out to Him, above your leaders who plant themselves so squarely between you and God, and who say to you, 'Accept our teaching or reject the Christ.' "

"I would have to add, 'This is not where the choice lies, really. You may reject Church of Christ teaching and still find God through Christ."' It was her hope that someone as troubled by the Church of Christ as she had been would read her words and take heart.

She knelt on the prayer stool. Turning to a passage in the prayer book she read silently:

Almighty God unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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She rose from her knees and sat motionless in the perfect stillness. Above her the vaulted ceiling arched like the hull of an inverted ark. She looked forward to this time of quietness before the service began. It was here, in facing the cross, that she could come to terms with the reality of suffering and, accepting, find mysterious release. Here the cross was the focal point of both the teaching and the architecture of the church.

She closed her eyes and in memory returned to a Church of Christ auditorium. She saw herself as a child, a young woman, a mother, silently absorbing and appraising a philosophy of God, man, and salvation, as sermon after sermon rolled down from the pulpit and into her heart. These churches, too, followed a pattern of design based on their doctrine. As in the Episcopal Church, architecture and teaching were closely coordinated. But in the Church of Christ there was no sign of a cross. There was no time for meditation.

"I had no right to impose on them an unnatural quiet they did not want," she thought. "But my own nature called for a sanctuary, and I had to find it."

She knew there were others in the Church of Christ who would have preferred meditation to small talk before the service. She felt they were needlessly deprived of the visible symbol of the cross as well as of the

meaning of the cross in the Christian faith. She saw them as a people who cannot admit the cross into their buildings or into their hearts, for to be confronted by the cross would be to lose all sense of earned salvation.

So the baptistery, instead, looms high in the Church of Christ building-as in its teachings. The cross features only an incident in the life of Him who, as they teach, made baptism the chief condition of salvation. Reconciliation, therefore, is not a gift, fully effected by Jesus on the cross. It is a reward, earned by man through obedience in baptism.

In the Church of Christ auditorium had she looked to left or right of the pulpit, her eye would have met a score board with postings of statistics. Straight ahead in dead center would be a stage where later a preacher would star as sole performer. He would flex his closed Bible at the congregation. He would say which verse is requisite to salvation, which is not. His sermon would be the core of the service. Beneath the stage, at the very foot of the preacher, would lie the body and blood of our Lord. She groaned inwardly and covered her face with her hands.

Lord, have mercy upon us.

Christ, have mercy upon us.

She opened her eyes to survey her present surroundings, where to look ahead was to face the cross. There was no escaping it. Here she looked up to the Lord's table. It was higher and nearer the cross than the minister's stand. His position to the side reminded both him and the congregation of his subservient role to these two holy mysteries, the cross and the sacraments.

She thought the place of the minister in the Church of Christ was overdone. The space given his pulpit, the time given his sermon, the songs picked to underscore his theme-all these geared the service to one man and his mood. It was too heavy a burden for him, too passive a role for the congregation. "Perhaps I won't mention this," she thought; "there is so much else."

.She might begin by explaining the error of the name, Church of Christ.

"Church of Christ," I shall have to tell them, "is a misnomer when used exclusively, as this church uses it. Church of Christ is the generic term for all Christian churches of all ages. It belongs equally to all denominations and has always been understood to mean the whole state of Christ's church. As such it is neither

52 VOICES OF CONCERN

identifying nor realistic when applied to a specific regional phenomenon within Christendom."

Because of this misunderstanding of its own name, the Church of Christ lacks true identification even among its own members. The Church of Christ person must ask the Church of Christ stranger the age-old question, long admitted by more realistic denominations: "Which branch?" The Church of Christ (the denomination) within the true Church of Christ (the whole of Christendom) has lesser Churches of Christ within it. Ad infinitum. Which branch is still as reasonable a question now as when Alexander Campbell started his movement to make the question obsolete.

But why should the question be obsolete? Paradoxically, the man most typically regional may be most universal. The greatest Christian of all, St. Paul, belonged to a sect and said so. "I am a Pharisee," he said in Acts 23: 6, although he belonged even then to the Church of Christ. Nor was Jesus superman but typical man. Son of Man, he liked to call himself, to show how typical. He was connected with a region (Galilee), with a race (the Jews), and with a time (under Pontius Pilate). He was not called Cosmopolitan but Nazarene, an unpretentious local name he never denied.

"I am a Southern woman, with an Episcopal father and a Church of Christ mother, one as regional as the other. My theology, such as it is, has been colored by these facts. How could I believe that the denomination, the Church of Christ, transcends history, persons, external influences, errors of interpretation or translation of the Bible, and the limitations of human understanding?"

She thought now with deep compassion and respect of her forefathers crossing the mountains from North Carolina into Tennessee, where every man with his Bible might establish his own church. That many did

A TIME TO SPEAK

53

was a practical necessity. God does not leave Himself without witnesses in any generation. Any ordained churchman who smiles at the theology of these settlers may well be asked, "Where were you?"

But although she revered her Church of Christ ancestors, she knew they were not all of Christendom, then or now. She thought all churches might be viewed with more tolerance by one another if they could see each other as a temporary craft, rising and falling on waves of historic necessity, as a sort of ark to carry us thrdugh the flood until the waters recede and we step out on firmer ground. The visible church is always a frail makeshift to bring us to shore. It is not always pleasant in the ark. We are varied and often incompatible creatures who live within. We stay there because it is worse outside. Death is there.

"If they had called themselves simple Campbellites and had admitted their place in time, it would have helped," she thought. "For they are neither the beginning nor the end of Christ's Church."

So much for the name. There are other matters. There are serious doctrinal errors.

Again she turned to the Prayer Book and read silently, this time from Psalm 133:

If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, 0, Lord, who may abide it ? Foretelling the law of grace, the psalmist asks a rhetorical question.

She would have to say something about the Church of Christ and grace, that uniquely Christian word. To her mother church, grace was a dangerous word, a word to be used only when it could be carefully ex- away. To mention grace was to follow with a warning of the inherent pitfall of trusting grace fully. Salvation by works, not by grace, was (and is) the teaching of her mother church.

Therefore, as a teenager, it was with astonishment that she had read one day in the Bible, "For by grace

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you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God-not because of works, lest any man should boast." Holding the open Bible in her hand and pointing to the chapter and verse in the manner of her people, she said to her mother, "This knocks our theory into a cocked hat." She said it in sorrow, for there is no satisfaction in discovering that you and your people before you have built your faith on an erroneous opinion.

Perhaps more people are reading the Bible nowadays, she mused, for in recent years the word grace crops up oftener in Church of Christ sermons. Grace had been uncovered by someone who had pointed out the word just as she had pointed it out. It was there. So the preachers were saying, "Grace is a good word, but it means grace to be baptized in order to be saved by the graciousness of God in granting baptism as the means of salvation." Which is nonsense. Grace means grace. But she knew well that for the people of her girlhood, this notion of a free gift of God was incomprehensible. Some puritanical harshness in the nature of these Scotch-Irish church fathers said to their God, as they said to the world, "I will accept nothing I have not earned."

"It's magnificent," she thought, "but it is not Christian."

In similar fashion, she reflected, they have dealt falsely with the Holy Spirit and have said, "The Holy Spirit means the Bible." Here again she saw a trace of rugged individualism in characters who refused to be "carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease," an attitude which they feared was encouraged by emphasis on the Spirit.

"And here I must tread lightly," she said, slipping again to her knees. "For the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and I am not worthy so much as to say the name, much less to explain it." She began to pray again:

0, God, who didst teach the heart of thy faithful people by sending them the light of thy Holy Spirit, Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things and evermore to rejoice in his Holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus, our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

She rose to a sitting position again and thought about the Church of Christ and its relationship to the Holy Spirit. "I could not say that they have a false concept of the Holy Spirit. They have almost no concept of it at all."

Campbell and other fathers of the Church of Christ had seen in frontier revivals too much of the mass hysteria said to be caused by the Spirit. They wanted none of this sensationalism. Like most reformers, they tended to over-correct. The result was that the Spirit was not included in the body of dogma of the Church of Christ. The nearest concession made by the group was to admit that the Spirit had dictated the Bible. In effect, they asked this question: do you follow the Bible along the picked path of Church of Christ teaching, omitting this verse as unessential, exalting this verse as requisite to salvation? If the answer was yes, then one could assume the Spirit was leading him.

"They have cut the heart out of the Christian religion," she thought, "when they stripped it of grace and the Holy Spirit."

What is left?

This brought her to the center of the problem, she felt. The Church of Christ, whatever else it may have discarded or ignored, has the Bible. This simple affirmation probably constitutes the group's chief problem. Here supposed strength turns out to be actual weakness. "This fact will come to light whether I say it or not," she thought. "For more of their people will read the Bible for themselves as the educational advantages

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VOICES OF CONCERN

of the group increase with new prosperity. They will see how preposterous this unqualified claim is."

It pleases the Church of Christ, she knew, to say to the world that it stands on the Bible alone, against modernism and atheism, and that herein lies the crux of its quarrel with the rest of the Christian and secular world. But there are many other Bible churches, and they also stand on the Bible alone. One would suppose, in reading Church of Christ literature, that this church has much in common with other evangelical, conservative Christians. Yet the truth is that the Church of Christ allies itself to no such groups, nor permits any of them to link themselves with it. Churches which do not accept the Church of Christ as final authority on interpretation of the Bible meet an insurmountable wall. This is not a Bible church against a non-Bible world; this is a church which claims to love the Bible but determinedly avoids such parts of the Bible as it does not stress in its circumscribed doctrine of selected scriptures.

Because of its claim to stand on the Bible alone, the Church of Christ will not face the fact that it has, in common with other churches, a body of dogma based partly on scriptures, partly on church authority. In each new generation the young preacher must go through the motions of assembling from scriptures the exact doctrine of the preceding generation. If he discovers new truths in the Bible, he is quickly branded as unsound. He does not have to depart from the Bible to acquire this stigma. He has only to pick unfamiliar verses within the Bible. So unless his Bible reading is superficial, he is soon at odds with his brotherhood. The group wants no prophets bent on pouring new wine into old skins. The brighter the rising star of the student, the earlier his meteoric fall. The leap of faith from the Church of Christ as Saviour to Jesus Christ as Saviour is a hazardous one. With blind faith

57

in the Church of Christ shattered, many young men give up Christianity altogether.

She turned to the back of her prayer book.

Item 6. Holy Scriptures containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein nor may be proved thereby is not to be required of any man ... that it should be thought requisite to salvation.

This is, in essence, the belief of all Protestant churches, and no church has a monopoly on the idea of Bible authority. However, most churches are frank to say that church authority also plays a part. The church itself as a corporate body has implied power to take action or set precedent that may not be proved by

the Bible. This is done as often in the Church of Christ

as in other churches and the Church of Christ has, as time and money have allowed, added whatever innovations as have seemed necessary for the general welfare. No one would think of taking them to task for this, but the group should admit that it does act from time to time on church authority, not on Bible authority alone. To call itself a Bible-only church makes it appear deluded to those who study the Bible.

Further deceiving itself, the group advertises itself as bound to stay within the written word. Not only does it fail to do this, but its people are not f ree to go about unrestricted even within the written word. Its members may speak where the Bible speaks only if the Church of Christ speaks to the subject.

For example, the Church of Christ rules out such scriptural practices as the ministry of healing, the holy kiss, the washing of f eet, mutual edification or the priesthood of all believers, the selling of all things and holding them in common, and the laying on of hands with which the book of Acts is replete. None of these items apply today, the Church of Christ states flatly. Yet all may be proved by the Bible.

The Church of Christ by its constituted authority has a right to ignore these passages. I defend this right. But its members would be happier if they understood that Church of Christ Policy is determined by church authority, not scriptural authority alone. Let the leaders openly announce the church dogma, explain that certain scriptures are disparaged by preference of the group and others emphasized for the same reason. Let them reveal the hidden hierarchy which determines such matters, and then take their place modestly, realistically, with the ranks of Christendom. Many of their followers could then breathe a sigh of relief at being released from the embarrassment of defending an untenable position. One could then respect their denomination as a lately come but welcome part of Christ's church.

Grace, the Holy Spirit, hierarchy. These are frightening words to the Church of Christ. There is a word of even stronger taboo among its members, however. This is the word "creed.' " It is denied by the group that they have a creed. Actually, they have a rigid creed known to all of them. They find unaccountable satisfaction in the fact that their creed is not written.

"Is a creed any less a creed because it is not written?" she recalled asking an aged seer in the Church of Christ. He gave her a long look but did not answer. These people are timid, wily, cautious of traps. They have the natural cunning of the person who seeks to trap others and is therefore always alert to being trapped himself. To those who do not know them, they appear both suspicious and crafty. Actually, they are frightened. (I know. I was there. I was frightened.) She pictured them as a flock of timid birds that must be lured with crumbs toward the rest of Christendom. One false move could startle them away. Yet she did not wish to trap them nor to hurt them. She was unarmed. It was she who was vulnerable to them because of her love for them. Her only wish for them was that

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they might be released from the trap of their own making.

She wished that they might learn to pray with other Christians. Turning to one of her favorite prayers, she read:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suff ered pain and entered not into glory before he was crucified, mercifully grant that we walking in the way of the cross may find it none other than the way of life and peace, through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

In the Church of Christ such written prayers, however comforting, are suspect, regardless of their truth. At the communion service in the Episcopal Church the minister would say, "And now as our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say . . ." And then in unison the congregation would begin, "Our Father, who art in heaven." Early Christians could be identified by claiming God as their Father. It took courage in those times of persecution for a convert to admit the Christian relationship in public assembly. "Bold to say" was therefore appropriate.

In the Church of Christ, however, the Lord's Prayer itself is forbidden. A member of the church may compose his own prayer on the spot, leading the congregation through phrases of sometimes doubtful theology, but when it comes to the Lord's Prayer, the group will not join in. A technicality precludes it. "Thy kingdom come" is a forbidden petition. Christ's kingdom has already come, they teach. It is the Church of Christ. His kingdom is here in this specific form as the only kingdom, now or ever. The Lord's Prayer is not said in the Church of Christ.

She was bold to say it now, her long-mute tongue finding joy in release: "Our Father, who art in heaven. ... Thy kingdom come."

"How can I welcome into Christendom a people who

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refuse to join in the Lord's Prayer with other Christians?" she asked silently in the dim stillness.

And now a chill spread through the building and enveloped her. Her heart grew cold as the disturbing truth rose into her consciousness. "Their doctrine breeds tragedy," she whispered.

For this woman, leaving the church of her childhood was not a rebellion against imagined restrictions nor a newly acquired taste for a more intellectual group. There was something deeper, something which made the Church of Christ theory intolerable to what was best in her nature. She had found through cumulative experience that rigid notions of sound doctrine can be dangerous to homes and even sanity, and this she could not reconcile with the gospel of Christ, which is good news, not bad. To understand this, one must know that the Church of Christ has an order of priority in which church doctrine always takes precedence over ethics, morals, common sense or common weal. Because of its claim to a perfect and unalterable plan of salvation, it may stand adamantly against the common good of the community.

She thought of a young girl, a charge of the state, who had been shuttled f rom one f oster home to another. The one stable factor in her life had been a continuing association with the Methodist Church. She was placed in a Church of Christ home where the family promptly made a concerted effort to disillusion her about her Methodist background and to break her connection with the Methodists. This family believed what every orthodox Church of Christ minister teaches, that any Church of Christ congregation under any circumstances is preferable to any other church, and that proselyting is a divine duty at whatever cost to the spirit of the convert. This may be disastrous when the victim is a child with few words but strong emotional ties to another group. The girl asked to be

placed in another home and this was done, but all cases do not turn out so well.

There are lighter cases of rigid doctrine in operation against ethics. "But I will not let the essay devolve into comedy," she promised.

Two Church of Christ women discussed a noted swindler:

-What did he do with all that money?"

"He gave it to the Lord."

"If I had been his lawyer," she thought, "I would

have built his defense on the grounds that in the church

which produced him, money is the spiritual status

symbol. Men are under pressure to make money, in

order to give money, in order to prove by money that

they love God, and that He loves them. The heroes of

faith in this culture tend to be financiers. Whatever

shadow of suspicion falls on s harp business practice

is covered by the doctrinal verity to which they subscribe: 'He gave it to the Lord.' "

There are sadder cases, involving more than money. She remembered the young husband who left his wife and small children destitute because, as his mother excused it, the wife would not go to church with her husband. Church-going may even take precedence over family support. And she recalled that none of the husband's church friends whom she encountered felt that his action was unjustified.

How many such cases could she remember? The world would not contain them. There are good people in the Church of Christ who deplore the wrongs done in the name of dogma and the Lord. But the attitude too frequent among them is that the more one silently endures these absurdities, the more pleased God is with the forbearance. Jesus was not so tolerant. His cleansing of the temple was the act of a man outraged at injustice. He snatched the nearest thing at hand and went to work on reforms. Because primary obedience is to the church, righteous indignation-that

most purifying of emotions-is stifled in the Church of Christ. Blind loyality [sic] is to the church, not to justice; to the church, not to morality; to the church, not to simple everyday goodness.

Needless to say, family relations suffer. The hearts of the sons are turned agains~ the fathers and the hearts of the fathers against the sons. Religion becomes the divider instead of the healer of the breach. Here, in the name of religion, husband and wife are at odds in an eternal triangle--men, women, and Godin which God set against man has placed woman at the base of the triangle. The marital relationship is summed up in Church of Christ doctrine by St. Paul's, "Wives, be in subjection." Property rights, personal rights, rights connected with the rearing of childrenthe wife has none if the husband decides to make a test case of this scripture. The dangers of this doctrine for the emotionally unstable man are plain.

A woman who tries to explain the Bible in the Church of Christ is in the unfortunate position of substantiating (by her very desire to explain) the charges being made against her kind. Plainly she is not fully subjected or she would not be possessed with the idea that she has something to say. So the more she says, the blacker it looks for her case.

She had wanted to say that St. Paul's "subjection" is used in juxtaposition with Christ's crucifixion. "As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands," and "this is a great mystery and I take it to mean Christ and the Church" (Eph. 5: 23). The subjection of which St. Paul speaks is elicited by the boundless love of the husband, as Christ loves the Church. Thus it is the husband who sets the tone of marriage since he represents Christ in the relationship. The wife's responsibility is to respond lovingly to his sacrifice. She is subject to him because he is crucified for her. If he is not the type of Christ, if his role is not saviour through

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sacrifice, then the wife's subjection to him is neither required nor commendable. The Christian woman worships the Christ image in her husband. If it is not there, she may be worshipping Satan. "Strong words," she thought, "but the Bible is strong meat for those who believe it."

Her mind turned to the Church of Christ practice of public confession by one person before the assembled congregation. Lacking any adequate scriptural precedent, the custom stemmed loosely from a verse ("confessing your faults one to another") which suggested person-to-person relationships in private talks, not person-to-audience. The Church of Christ family never knows when a moving sermon may trigger a march to the f ront of the church by some unstable member who will confess what is often his own grievance thinly disguised as his error. Surprising family situations are disclosed in public, but solutions remain as remote as before.

"I could give a dozen examples of harm done by this practice," she thought. She began to sort them in her mind for typical cases, but as each dreadful circumstance was relived she discarded it as too painful to repeat. Yet these sad histories had been recounted in public assembly to a curious congregation. She was glad to be in a church where there is only general confession by the congregation in unison. No opportunity is offered in general confession for the exhibitionist to compound his crime by exploiting it in public confession.

The church was filling now. Usually with her own prayers said, she tried to join her silent prayer to that of whatever person came in and knelt to pray. Would they have found strength for their separate tasks for the week in the services she recalled from young womanhood? Many who have sat through those services have found them strangely unnerving.

"I can't afford the demoralization," a young friend

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had confided to her about the Sunday service in his church. But he had kept on going. If he attends any religious service now it is in the institution to which he is confined. Ile was brighter than the group, but he was loving, and out of loyalty and pity for his parents he would not leave the Church of Christ and break their hearts. He has been forced to pretend to an ignorance he does not have. An inexorable toll is demanded of the spirit that buries its talent. But the church which advertised its visiting evangelist as "A Teacher From God," (I knew him; he was actually from Texas) demands modesty of its lay members, and the brilliant one is called proud if he does not hide his light beneath a bushel. My young friend is innocent, but those who preached to him are not.

An angel stared down at her from the stained-glass window as she half turned towards the light. Sternfaced but beautiful, he was a thoroughly masculine angel. In his hand was an arrow-straight dart of light. Beneath was inscribed, from Isaiah, "I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet."

"I will warn them," she said to the angel. "They must stop this dreadful business of substituting a limited system for the limitless Son of God. They must step down and let the people see God, who is worthy to be loved not only with heart and soul but with strength and mind."

Is God tyrant or father? Do our minds threaten Him as if He fears our growing knowledge may usurp His power? Or do our minds delight him, as the mind of the child delights the father in whose image the child is made?

"God is not interested in your opinion," the Church of Christ preacher had said to her when she was a young girl, years ago. And she, left alone with God, had said to Him, "Of course you are! Why would you number the hairs on my head if what goes on inside does not concern you?"

Shortly after that she had written a letter to an unknown Church of Christ preacher who had left his denomination for another brotherhood. In his reply he had written about God as the seeker of the lost sheep, as the father racing out to meet the son, as the offerer of the supreme gift, as the placating one, not the one to be placated. He had written:

"The sheep is found through God's initiative and is returned with rejoicing-redemption through love. God's way of changing our hearts and lives is through overwhelming demonstration of love and concern, not through threats and intimidations. We love Him because Ile first loved us. 'Love compels us,' said Paul about his own life. The cross leaves us without excuse; we have no answer for a love like that."

Her happiness at hearing her view of God confirmed, she resolved to begin her search for deliverance, not only for herself but for her people. There was no hurry. She stayed on for many years, waiting for an indication that she had God's permission to leave the church to which He, in His wisdom, had assigned her at her birth. At last, in the fulness of time, the Church of Christ slipped off her shoulders as a worn cape drops when the last thread breaks. It had not warmed her for years. She scarcely noticed when it fell away.

"May someone in the Church of Christ who needs such a message as my friend wrote to my need in those dark days find in his words the blessing I found and continue to find," she prayed quietly.

The service was beginning. The minister stood on a low step before the congregation and gave the call to worship:

The hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

"Thank you," she said in her heart to God. "Thank You for seeking us. Thank you for deliverance."

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Whatever the original estrangement between man and God, the Grand Apology had been offered. Whatever our personal estrangement, He is there waiting to make amends. He is there in such profound reality that the knowledge is almost more joy than we can bear. There would never be ways enough to show her gratitude, but she would begin by writing the essay as best she could.