No Creed but Christ: Scripture as the Only Rule
As taught in the Restorationist / Churches of Christ tradition
The Stone-Campbell plea for Scripture alone as the rule, with no binding human creed.
The Restorationist tradition that descends from Barton W. Stone and the Campbells - known collectively as the Stone-Campbell Movement, and surviving today in the Churches of Christ, the independent Christian Churches, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) - is organised around a single governing conviction: that the Bible alone is the rule of faith and practice, and that no humanly composed creed, confession, or council possesses authority to bind the conscience of a Christian. The slogans by which the movement is popularly remembered - "No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no name but the divine," and "We speak where the Scriptures speak, and are silent where the Scriptures are silent" - are not mere rhetoric. They encode a deliberate programme for ending denominational division by returning to what these reformers called the "original ground" of the apostolic church.
By the end of this lesson
- Explain the Restorationist claim that Scripture is both all-sufficient and alone-sufficient as the rule of faith, and how this differs from the mainstream Protestant use of subordinate confessions.
- Distinguish, using Thomas Campbell's third and sixth propositions, between an express scriptural command and a human inference, and explain why only the former may serve as a term of communion.
- Trace the rule of silence (where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent) from the founding of the Christian Association of Washington to its later role in dividing the movement over instrumental music and missionary societies.
- Identify the three primary documents of the early movement (the 1804 Last Will and Testament, the 1809 Declaration and Address, and the 1839 Christian System) and summarise the distinct contribution of each.
- Show how the four anchor passages (2 Timothy 3:16-17; Galatians 1:6-9; 1 Peter 4:11; Revelation 22:18-19) are read together to ground the sufficiency of Scripture and the rejection of binding creeds.
- State fairly the principal criticisms of the no creed but Christ position and the tradition's own replies, including the abuse-not-use qualification in the Declaration and Address's Appendix.
Scripture
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