No Creed but Christ: Restoring the New Testament Church
As taught in the Restorationist / Churches of Christ tradition
How the Stone-Campbell movement sought Christian unity on the New Testament pattern.
The Stone-Campbell movement, also called the Restoration Movement and surviving today in the Churches of Christ, the Christian Churches, and the Disciples of Christ, arose on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century with a single governing conviction: that the visible disunity of the church was a scandal, and that the cure was not a better creed but a return to the New Testament pattern of belief and practice held in common before later additions divided believers into parties. Its early leaders, Barton W. Stone in Kentucky and the Scots-Irish father and son Thomas and Alexander Campbell in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, did not set out to found a new denomination. They set out, in their own descriptions, to dissolve denominations into the one body of Christ.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain the Stone-Campbell aim of recovering the New Testament church pattern as the basis for Christian unity, rather than negotiating among existing parties.
- State the slogans 'where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where they are silent, we are silent' and 'no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible' and attribute them to their sources.
- Describe the movement's distinctive positions on baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, and congregational autonomy.
- Identify the three foundational documents (the Last Will and Testament, the Declaration and Address, and The Christian System) and the contribution of each.
- Articulate, descriptively and without condemnation, where the movement parts from creedal and denominational Christianity.
Scripture
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