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My sisters and brothers, the day has finally come. I have been looking forward to this morning for several months now, anticipating with great excitement what it would be like to stand before you and remind ourselves of several of the key pillars of our Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) identity. This morning and for the following two Sundays, we will take up something special, something unique in our identity, that makes us a useful tool for the Spirit of God in this time.

Think back. Have there been times when you have answered someone's question about your church home with something like this, " I am a member of University Christian Church which is right on the edge of UT’s campus, you know across from the Littlefield fountain there." Then the person you're speaking with asks you if UCC is a nondenominational church. And then you have the challenge before you of describing just who the Christian Church (Disciples Christ) is. Oh, you can say that we are a mainline Protestant church similar in many ways to the Presbyterians or to the Methodists, but what they want to know and what you need to be able to tell them in that rare teaching moment is what is distinctive about our tradition here. What is the very particular valence that the Spirit has granted us best to lift up in the overabundance of churches in the U.S. today. So each of these mornings we will be focusing on one of the particular elements. This morning I want to tell you the story of one of those elements that has had to undergo a huge reinterpretation, a principle dear to the heart of our founders, known as Restorationism.

But let me begin with a personal story that I think captures this need for this re-evaluation. Almost exactly 3 years ago now, as my then 19 yr. old son David and I were traveling through the United Kingdom, we arrived late one evening in Glasgow, Scotland – and were fortunate to find an available Bed and Breakfast there- in this special place where I anticipated experiencing the finest highlight of our trip.

Though I was still battling the fever and weakness that accompanied the lung infection I was being treated for, my excitement was growing because …I knew that we were getting close to where both Thomas and Alexander Campbell had been educated...the two men who were at the forefront of the development of the movement that became our denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)!

Early the next morning while David was still sleeping I slipped out of our room, got a hasty breakfast and walked, what turned out to be a very short distance, to the University of Glasgow. As I approached the old regal buildings I could imagine Thomas and Alexander coming across the Irish Sea from their home in a County Court, Ireland to this incredible university atmosphere in order to get their education. There I took dozens and dozens of photographs of the major buildings of the University, looking at the architecture and the fine cut of the enormous windows, the soaring spires, the stable foundation stones. In those moments I was reveling, seeing with my own eyes what I envisioned Thomas and Alexander would have seen nearly 200 years ago, drinking in the place where a fine theological education opened their minds, changed their thinking, their lives… and later my life and yours. If I’d returned to the bed and breakfast right then, like I had a mind to do, this story would have had a very different ending.

Instead, as the University was unlocking its doors for the morning, I decided to stay a little longer, look a bit deeper, and found a disturbing brochure at the admissions desk told me that these is glorious building I had been admiring and loving, imagining to be so significant in our history, turned out to be buildings that neither Thomas nor Alexander Campbell ever even saw when they attended the university there in the early 1800's. The building I was in was not even constructed until 1878! It turns out that the buildings of the time they attended the university had been built on lowlands of the city down near the river. The land there was marshy and bad for their health. When disease and unsanitary conditions progressively worsened, the University trustees decided to abandon the lowland property for a school higher up on the Hill. I was crushed to learn that all that still existed from that original school that the Campbells had attended was about 80ft. of one tottering brick wall… which I would hunt down to my great disappointment later that day. The site was abandoned, overgrown, a blight.

A few minutes later when the library opened I went looking for some of the memorabilia from the Campbells. The librarian did not know a thing about anyone named Alexander Campbell. Thomas Campbell, she knew about Thomas Campbell. But when she started sharing some of her information it was clear that she was not talking about our Thomas Campbell, co-founder of the first powerful movement towards Christian unity on American soil; she was talking about Thomas Campbell the great Scottish poet of whom a statue still stands on the central square of Glasgow!

It didn’t get any better. Nobody I spoke with on that day in Glasgow had any idea about the identities of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. As the religious history of Scotland and all the Britain would unfold, from the Campbells' day to our own, many have been so riveted to their narrow little brand of Christian faith, that the whole notion of an ecumenical Christian faith such as the Campbells promoted, an open Christian faith, a broadly accepting Christian faith… could find no purchase in Europe.

My disillusionment in Glasgow mirrored a similar disillusionment that our forbearers in faith here in America experienced in the late 1800's and early 1900's. In the same way that the University I had expected to be the Campbells' university didn't exist anymore, our forbearers discovered that one of the great pillars of the early movement, in the early 1800's, wasn't there either. They had read the scriptures carefully, in the Book of Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament, and expected that in those days in the early Christian church Christians had been unified, loving and caring, well-organized, and more or less of one mind about the nature of the faith that they professed. [1]

They found in the scriptures was a picture of True Christian Community. [2] And they were committed to restoring that in their own churches on the American frontier. Restoring the glorious harmony the earliest Christian church, the Restoration Principle, became a prime element of their message.[3] Now, if they had just walked away from further study, if they had closed their books and their minds at this point, the Christian movement that our University Christian Church represents would have been so similar to what our neighbors at University Avenue Church of Christ believe, that there would be no need for two congregations here today.

At this point in our story, a poster from the 1970’s comes to mind. It shows a picture of an old fashioned wringer washing machine and a rag doll beside it that has been pressed nearly flat. It quotes Jesus’ words from John 8:31, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." Well this poster said, “The truth will make you free, but first it’ll put you through the wringer.”

And our forbearers in the late 1800’s went through a theological wringer, alright. They discovered as they opened their ears and eyes to the discoveries of higher biblical criticism,[4]a careful and scholarly study of the texts –as it was being propounded in the universities of Europe and a bit later in the universities of America, what they discovered was that the unity and simplicity and harmony of life that they had believed existed in the early Christian church, really never did exist.

What these new biblical study tools uncovered was that instead, the early church was a patchwork of beliefs, styles of organization, and perspectives. In fact, without trying to be too crass about it, we probably could trace back our differences with our University Avenue Church of Christ sisters and brothers back to this point-whether or not we were going to accept what we have been learning from higher biblical criticism and thus give up Restorationism as one of our key Disciples principles, or whether we were going to reject the learnings of higher biblical criticism and hang on to that restoration principle. The Disciples chose the former. The Churches of Christ chose the latter.

Some in the Christian Church Disciples of Christ almost make fun of those in the Churches of Christ because of their decision not to allow musical instruments and to their worship life. But the real issue is much more substantial than to piano or not to piano. The real issue is how we're going to interpret Scripture. In the churches of Christ there is a much more literalist understanding of the Bible. And there is a tendency to see in the Bible a blueprint, or as our early leaders in the movement called it, a constitution, a set of government, with a set of rules by which the church will act.

We in the Christian Church Disciples of Christ took the other tack. Embracing what we learn from higher criticism, we recognize the painful historical truth, that the early church never did express the unity that we had previously thought. If you are following:

the writings of Elaine Pagels and others these days, you f1ind that the early churches were even more diverse than we believed 100 years ago, in fact, more diverse than anything we have ever seen! In fact, what we are discovering is that the range of Christian understandings was so broad in those early days that what we have come to know as Christian orthodoxy grew up as a response to the incredibly wide range of opinions that others in the neighboring churches believed.

Giving up on this restoration principle that is such a deep hunger, to be able to recreate the life of the earliest Christian Church, has been a hard thing for us. But necessary. Absolutely necessary. And as Jesus in the Gospel of John teaches, “the Truth will set you free.”

Freed from the illusion that there was some nostalgic better day, we have been freed to recognize that:

>that the Holy Spirit was also active later as the collection of books were put together into what we call the bible,

>that the Holy Spirit was active in the early bishops presiding over the care of the Christian Church in the Mediterranean and later in Europe,

>that the Holy Spirit was active in the Protestant Reformation and undertaken by Martin Luther, John Calvin and others,

>that the Holy Spirit was active in Thomas and Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone and raccoon John Smith,

>>>and that the Holy Spirit is still active in the Church and our congregations today.

The Holy spirit's activity never ceases even in the midst of the Church – with a capital C - that is always ambiguous, a curious and frustrating admixture of:

But however faithful or unfaithful the church is in light of the gospel message that it carries, God is faithful to salvage and use the best from us to carry that message forward even in these very earthen vessels that we are always.

So, now you and I return to our study of scripture, no longer trying to find evidence for an imagined harmonious early Christian church, with a new goal. Now our goal is to find the principles of establishing that True Community that the New Testament and the Spirit of Jesus have always pointed us towards. And when we look, there they are, plain as day. Our denomination's former general minister and president Richard Hamm, and our one of our finest theologians, Michael Kinnamon, have named them:

In our next two sermons, we will flesh out the trajectory of this journey of faith in our day, but for now, for today listen…..

Listen to the call of God in your heart… build wholesome, truthful, forgiving, reconciling community. On World Communion Sunday, confessing our past failures to respond to God’s graciousness, let us Listen and follow our ever-faithful God forward into the unfolding future, dedicated to the search for Truth at whatever cost.

1.) Thomas Campbell wrote in The Declaration and Address:

“all such things, by simply returning to the original standard of

christianity--the profession and practice of the primitive church,

as expressly exhibited upon the sacred page of New Testament

scripture, is the only possible way, that we can perceive, to get rid

of those evils. And we humbly think that a uniform agreement in

that for the preservation of charity would be infinitely preferable to

our contentions and divisions: nay, that such a uniformity is the

very thing that the Lord requires, if the New Testament be a

perfect model--a sufficient formula for the worship discipline and

government of the christian church. Let us do, as we are there

expressly told they did, say as they said: that is, profess and prac-

tise as therein expressly enjoined by precept and precedent, in

every possible instance, after their approved example; and in so

doing we shall realize, and exhibit, all that unity and uniformity,

that the primitive church possessed, or that the law of Christ re-

quires.”

2.)As Mark Toulouse notes in Joined in Discipleship: the Maturing of an American Religious Movement, 1992, Chalice Press, p. 68, “Disciples of the nineteenth century believed that all local gatherings of Christians in the first and second centuries were perfectly unified in all essential matters of faith and organization. This presupposition was central to the early Disciples commitment to the restorationism.”

And then on p. 69 “The context provided by higher criticism challenged all these earlier affirmations. Beginning with their renewed theological understanding of the church as an organization which, try as it may, can never escape its historical relativity. Disciples have concluded that the church has never seen a golden age when it was pure and without blemish. Though inspired and driven by a sincere commitment to divine purposes in history, the church can never completely escape both its historical existence (and, therefore, its relative and finite existence in history) or its humanity (and, therefore, its sinfulness).

Historical research over the last century has collaborated what the increased theological sensitivity of Disciples has concluded about the nature of the church. Disciples, and other mainline Protestants, now know that the early church only gradually developed in its self-understanding. Jewish, Greek, and Roman elements all combined to affect its development as an institution, both in its structure and in its thought. History has revealed very clearly the fact of diversity in the early church. There never was one ancient church, but instead, an assortment of early churches. The practices, church government, and, yes, even the faith of these early congregations were quite diverse depending on geographical location and cultural influences. For example, the congregation in Antioch differed considerably from the congregation in Jerusalem. Even as these two fellowships undoubtedly shared a common love for Christ, they defined the nature of the Christian life, for the individual and for the church, quite differently (refer to Acts 15, for example). In other words, there really never existed some singular unified early church Disciples could restore in the modern period.”

3.) Ibid. Toulouse’s work is not only central in the focus of this sermon, but of each of the following two in this sermon series. His evaluation of the major principles of the Disciples mindset is widely regarded as accurate, in my experience.

4.) Fields of Literary Criticism, Redaction Criticism, Textual Criticism, Tradition Criticism, Form Criticism, Canonical Criticism, for example, all have bearing on these developments. See for example the summary treatments found in “Modern Biblical Interpretation” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 1993, Oxford Univ. Press.