I return now to Eugene Boring’s book Disciples and the Bible (1997), which I recently read and wrote about here. There was so much of interest in this book that I need a second post on it. But go back to the first post for an introduction to the book and my basic—rather lengthy—take on it.

Alexander Campbell

There were several things I learned about Alexander Campbell.

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Campbell’s Canon within the Canon

One new thing for me was Campbell’s canon within the canon. Of course, I knew that this would be the New Testament, and more specifically Acts and the Epistles. I knew this not only through having read about the history of the Stone-Campbell Movement, but from personal experience of Campbell’s intellectual descendants—that is, growing up in Churches of Christ. But what was new was that Campbell’s own canon within the canon was less Acts and more Epistles. Indeed, I would have assumed the opposite. Before reading Boring, if you had asked me to identify the one book of the Bible that has been most important to Churches of Christ, without hesitation I would have said the book of Acts. Indeed, I have said such a thing, and I remain convinced that it is true. I have experienced it. More than any other book, it is the book of Acts that has been cited to justify different practices in the churches and schools I have known—how to become a Christian, how to worship, how often to take the Lord’s Supper. There are other Christian groups that are known more for their emphasis on, let’s say, Paul’s epistle to the Romans. I would not locate Churches of Christ among them. So it is interesting to me that for Campbell, the Epistles were more influential than Acts. From Boring’s description, it seems that Acts was not in the first rank, but probably ahead of the Gospels in terms of importance. It was the evangelist Walter Scott—and later J. W. McGarvey (see below)—who bequeathed to us our emphasis on Acts.

I certainly would not have picked Hebrews as the most influential biblical book (p. 75), though I would have ranked Hebrews ahead of Romans. According to Boring, Hebrews was the canon within the canon for Alexander Campbell, a surprise for me just as Boring says that it surprised him. When Boring said that there was one particular section of the Epistles that was especially important to Campbell, I had no idea what section he meant. It was Hebrews. Boring does say that Romans was very important to Campbell, close to Hebrews in Campbell’s thought (p. 75 n. 23). And again: “one could say that Romans and Hebrews were central to Campbell’s thought. But this would be misleading….”

Also new to me: the implications that Boring draws from this favoritism of the Epistles. Campbell’s christology was Pauline, meaning propositional with little reflection on the actual life of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels (p. 74). “This Pauline christological perspective carried with it as its corollary that Christian life would be conceived not as ‘following Jesus’ but as response in faith to the exalted Christ within the church” (p. 75).

Of course it wasn’t new to me that Revelation has played a limited role in the Restoration Movement (pp. 77–79), but it was new that one corollary is that Disciples do not anticipate the imminent return of Jesus (bottom of p. 79), just as Campbell did not.

Campbell and Restoration

What about the claim that “Alexander Campbell was not as ‘restorationist’ oriented as either his father or his contemporary Walter Scott, but he did use the language of restorationism, which was inherent in the Protestant tradition from which he sprang” (82)?

I wonder if this is right. Compare what Richard Hughes says in the first edition of Reviving the Ancient Faith, 22–23, where he shows that the early Campbell was much more ready to talk about a restoration of Christianity than the later Campbell. Campbell explicitly magnified his restoration movement over Luther’s reformation. Campbell wrote the following in 1825.

Celebrated as the era of Reformation is, we doubt not but that the era of Restoration will as far transcend it in importance and fame, through the long and blissful Millenium [sic], as the New Testament transcends in simplicity, beauty, excellency and majesty, the dogmas and notions of the creed of Westminster and the canons of the Assembly’s Digest. Just in so far as the ancient order of things, or the religion of the New Testament, is restored, just so far has the Millenium commenced.

This is the early Campbell; the above quotation is from the end of his first article titled “A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things,” which appeared in his first journal, The Christian Baptist (see here, and the quotation appears in the second volume [1824] on p. 156 of the version available online).

The later Campbell, according to Hughes, was less interested in restoration, a change recognized (Hughes says, p. 390 n. 47) already by Jeremiah Jeter, in Campbellism Examined (1855), 338–53, 357–58.

So Boring’s assessment, quoted earlier, reflects the mature Campbell more than the young firebrand. That quotation from Boring comes in a section (pp. 80–84) in which he argues that Campbell wasn’t as committed to pattern restorationism as his followers. Here’s another quotation from that section: “Once the ‘movement’ had become a denomination of considerable size, a denomination for which he rightly felt some responsibility, he settled matters of the life and practice of churches not by an appeal to a New Testament pattern, but by appealing to common sense and practicality.” I think Hughes and, more recently, Douglas Foster (Campbell’s recent biographer) would basically agree.

Campbell Leads a Denomination

Speaking of Campbell’s leadership of a denomination, I was intrigued that Boring was able to cite (p. 84 n. 32) a statement from Campbell himself using this term, denomination, for his movement. In the lead-up to the Campbell-Rice debate of 1843, Campbell wrote to a fellow: “You represent a denomination; so do I.” Here I quote a little more:

Other Stuff I Learned about Campbell

I appreciated Boring’s comments on how Campbell treated Acts 8:37 (p. 88). Campbell published his own translation of the New Testament called The Living Oracles. In this translation, he had to decide what to do with verses that were in the KJV but—as the further study of Greek manuscripts was showing—were not well attested in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. One of these problematic verses is Acts 8:37, which records the confession of faith of the Ethiopian eunuch immediately before his baptism. Because this verse records a pre-baptismal confession, it has become influential in Churches of Christ, even though it is not well-attested in Greek manuscripts. Whatever influence this verse has exerted on Churches of Christ, apparently it is not owing to Campbell’s influence. In the first edition of his translation, Campbell printed the verse in italics, and in subsequent editions he omitted the verse entirely. On the other hand (p. 88 n. 35), Campbell retained the long ending of Mark and provided no note indicating any textual problem.

Campbell accepted the silly interpretation about the camel through the eye of a needle (cf. Mark 10:25), and even put it as a note in his Bible translation (Boring, 104).

I appreciated the discussion as to whether Alexander Campbell was a scholar (57–60). Boring does conclude that “Campbell was a scholar” (p. 59), even though he acknowledges that “Campbell was not only not a member of, he was utterly unknown to, the scholarly community of his own generation” (pp. 58–59). Boring justifies his evaluation of Campbell by providing a three-part definition of a scholar: (1) one who studies; (2) who bases his conclusions on evidence rather than tradition and publishes these conclusions; and (3) uses the prevailing methods of scholarship. “Alexander Campbell qualifies on all points.”

It might be worth reflecting together on the three points of emphasis in the section on Alexander Campbell, “Holistic but Discriminating” (pp. 62–69), that is, dispensationalism, mighty acts of God, and soteriology, and to what extent in our experience Churches of Christ have maintained these emphases and whether we should.

Restorationism and Biblical Criticism

Boring sees restorationism and biblical criticism as incompatible.

It has not always been so clearly seen that the affirmation of biblical criticism, though compatible with unity, cannot be harmonized with restorationism. The First Generation did not see this, because their advocacy of biblical criticism had not yet led to the insight that neither the Bible nor the early church were what the restorationist ideology had conceived them to be. (Boring, p. 112; repeated at the bottom of p. 209; again pp. 363–64)

I disagree. Restoration coheres necessarily with biblical criticism. I have taught this for years to my ministry students. If the Bible and the early church are different from what restorationist ideology has conceived them to be (as Boring maintained), then the ideology must bow to the truth. That doesn’t make the restoration impulse wrong; it is an expression of the restoration impulse.

Boring again:

It is biblical criticism that lets us see both the early church and the Bible in a light that is no longer compatible with restorationism. Historical criticism of the Bible lets us see both that there is no single ‘pattern’ in ‘the’ New Testament church that can be restored, and that the Bible is not the kind of book that can be interpreted legalistically as the ‘constitution’ that authorizes some practices and not others. (364, where see also his comments on Churches of Christ)

What I think Boring is really arguing, though he doesn’t say it this way, is that we have done restoration poorly. I don’t see that he provides a compelling argument that we should abandon restorationism altogether.

But then Boring says that we need not repudiation of restorationism but reinterpretation, and he points to a book chapter by Mark Toulouse and an essay by Clark Williamson (in this book).

J. W. McGarvey

The middle chapter of Boring’s book (ch. 6) compares J. W. McGarvey with H. L. Willett. Before reading this book, I was not familiar with the name Herbert Lockwood Willett, who died in 1944 after a long career at the University of Chicago. He does not have a wikipedia page. I was familiar with J. W. McGarvey. He was much adored at Freed-Hardeman when I was a student there in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During those years, I acquired his Short Essays in Biblical Criticism and his original commentary on Acts and his commentary on Matthew and Mark and his little book on Deuteronomy—or was it on Jonah? Or both? I also purchased his Gospel harmony. The FHU professors adored McGarvey.

Actually, as I open my copy of the commentary on Acts, I am reminded of how I acquired it. On the first page, I wrote my name and then the note, “inherited from Dad.” And now I recall that my father had acquired a fairly impressive biblical studies library, especially in books by authors within Churches of Christ, and he gave all of these books to me upon my graduation from FHU.

I recall hearing at FHU two stories about McGarvey. First, McGarvey, who died in 1911, left a congregation in Lexington over the use of instrumental music, and when he first arrived at the his new church home, an acapella congregation, one of the elders greeted McGarvey with the comment, “We’ve been expecting you,” or something like that. And the second story, not much of a story, is that when McGarvey died, there appeared in the London Times an obituary that referred to McGarvey as “the ripest Bible scholar in America.” I now have serious doubts about the point of this story. I do believe that probably an obituary ran in a prominent newspaper, perhaps the London Times, and I’m sure the obituary referred to McGarvey as “the ripest Bible scholar in America.” That word, “ripest,” is too odd to have no connection to an actual obituary. But I am convinced that the obituary was not written by a Times editor but was printed after being submitted by a fan of McGarvey’s—just as local newspapers today print obituaries written by family members of the deceased. I have never run across McGarvey’s name cited in any work of biblical scholarship, and I would imagine that among the group of scholars meeting at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in, let’s say, 1905, no one had ever heard of him. I wonder if any of his books found an audience outside his own church circles.

What does Boring not like about McGarvey? He attributes to McGarvey this viewpoint: “Those of false or perverted faith are seen as morally reprobate, not merely doctrinally mistaken; they are deceivers and hypocrites whose motives are impure” (p. 212).

In response, I can say first of all that this viewpoint is very familiar today in American politics: people who do not share your viewpoint are wicked.

Second, I am not sure to what extent this is an accurate description of McGarvey, but I wouldn’t argue against it.

Third, a question: to what extent is the sentence quoted from Boring a true depiction of reality? Or this sentence on the same page: “Heresy is not merely an intellectual misstep, but an expression of sin; false faith is inevitably bound up with a false heart” (p. 212). Is there not some truth in this? Or, at least, people have long thought so. Indeed, these comments from Boring describe McGarvey, but Boring himself also says they reflect views found in the early church.

On the other hand, as to whether people who hold false beliefs really are wicked—that is a question that is easier and more safely considered in the abstract, not tied to any particular “false” Christian. When we disagree with people, we should keep the discussion at the level of ideas and not descend to personal attacks. To the extent that McGarvey did that, he damaged the church.

McGarvey on Acts

McGarvey wrote two Acts commentaries, an Original Commentary published in 1863, and a New Commentary published in 1892. The new commentary is available on archive.org: vol. 1, vol. 2. The original commentary is also available online (here).

Boring makes it clear that the new commentary (1892) became significant in the history of the Disciples, and Boring assumes the same to be the case in Churches of Christ. In fact, Boring claims “The co-editor of the Churches of Christ journal Gospel Advocate once pronounced [the New Commentary on Acts] ‘the greatest uninspired book ever written’” (p. 248). Boring provides no citation and does not identify the “co-editor” in question.

Before reading this comment from Boring, I had already been thinking about what Guy N. Woods—no doubt Boring’s “co-editor of the … Gospel Advocate”—had said about McGarvey’s commentary, but I was positive that Woods had made the comment about the original commentary and not the new commentary.

So I did some digging. I thought I must have read Woods’ comment (probably 25 years ago) in one of his volumes of Questions and Answers that he compiled from questions he received as the Answer Man at the Freed-Hardeman Lectureship back in the 1960s and 1970s. I went down to our library and pulled the two volumes off the shelf.

I started with the second volume, on a hunch, which proved to be wrong. I flipped through both volumes for almost 2 hours—I cannot say the time was wasted, there is much of interest in these volumes—and near the end of volume 1, I finally found the question:

What books have you found to be most helpful to you in your work as a preacher of the gospel?

The first book Woods lists is: “McGarvey’s Original Commentary on Acts.” Woods offers this comment:

Any work of man will exhibit imperfections, and there are views (not many) in this work which I do not follow; yet, I regard it as the greatest uninspired work ever written. Mastery of this matchless work will equip one better to preach the gospel than all the knowledge contained in a hundred works of theology often seen on the shelves of preachers today. The Gospel Advocate, in making this work available again (it was long out of print), made a contribution of inestimable value to the cause of Christ. (1.313)

A few more points on McGarvey

My search through these volumes by Woods also led to another interesting discovery: Woods says that “the London Times once said, [that McGarvey] had the most thorough and profound knowledge of the English Bible of any man on earth” (vol. 1, p. 255). Interesting that Woods specifies, “the English Bible,” a statement that agrees with Boring’s depiction of McGarvey as professor of English Bible.

Boring starts his discussion of McGarvey by warning his readers that we should not make fun of McGarvey or think him completely unworthy of our attention. These comments show that Boring assumes an audience that has heard negative things about McGarvey, which I never have. But his discussion of McGarvey does show the weakness of the man, and an approach to the Bible different from my own. According to Boring in reference to McGarvey, “what he had was a rationalist system that feared critical biblical study because it messed up his system” (230).

Everyone who would know firsthand something of the history of Disciples theology/biblical interpretation must read McGarvey’s New Commentary on Acts of Apostles, at least the Introduction and his commentary on chapters one and two. McGarvey’s commentary on Acts is one of the classic documents of Disciples history…. (p. 248)

And about McGarvey’s instruction of students at the College of the Bible in Lexington.

In actual practice, during the student’s first three years at Lexington, McGarvey restricted biblical study to the content of the biblical text filtered through his own unconscious hermeneutic and tradition, while, in his judgment, the students’ ears were too tender for criticism. He then introduced critical issues, filtered through his own perspective, only in the fourth year. (p. 239)

This is exactly what I experienced at FHU in the late twentieth century.

The Five-Finger Exercise

The phrase “five-finger exercise” refers to a formula for becoming a Christian, originally developed by the early nineteenth century evangelist Walter Scott and universally known in Churches of Christ (and Disciples, I think) in an altered form, as follows: hear, believe, repent, confess, be baptized. These points, counted off on the fingers, explain a person’s responsibility for accepting God’s offer of salvation. It is often called the plan of salvation. It has been extraordinarily influential.

The “plan of salvation” became the one overarching framework for the interpretation of the Bible. This represents the triumph of Scott over Campbell and Stone in this aspect of the Second Generation’s developing hermeneutic. In the First Generation, Thomas and Alexander Campbell’s themes were “unity and restoration,” and focused on the problem of a divided church and human creeds that caused division. Walter Scott comes into the mix late, with a different agenda: evangelism, conversion, Acts. In the Second Generation, when there was a separate movement concerned with its own growth, Scott’s “plan of salvation” became a hermeneutical focus for Disciples theology in a way it had not been previously. (p. 202)

Boring doesn’t like this influence of the five-finger exercise, and I don’t either. I mean, it’s a fine formula when it stays in its lane, but it shouldn’t be considered the hermeneutical key to any part of the Bible, much less the entire Bible. But Boring wants to replace it. This comes up in the final chapter, when Boring proposes a new five-finger exercise.

I don’t really like Boring’s proposal. Don’t get me wrong: his new five-finger exercise, summarizing the story of Scripture, is fine; I just don’t see why it would need to be called a five-finger exercise, or why it should replace the traditional one based on Scott’s model. The traditional five-finger exercise addresses a different issue—not the meaning of the Bible but the response of the individual to God’s offer of grace. That seems to me still necessary, and I don’t get Boring’s idea that it is no longer relevant (p. 441; but he later says that it might be, p. 444). Boring even implies at one point (p. 400) that his new five-finger exercise is designed to address the question, “What must I do?” but it clearly does not address that question. It summarizes the entire story of the Bible, and the Bible—as Boring says at various points in this book (e.g., p. 131)—is not all about what an individual should do to respond to God’s offer of grace.

Insular Reading Strategy

There is a common view today especially in very conservative Churches of Christ that one should read material, especially Bible class material, only from people in Churches of Christ. Boring spends some time emphasizing that early Disciples writers typically do not follow this strategy. They do not cite Disciples writings, not even the writings of Alexander Campbell. Boring discusses this point in respect to Isaac Errett (p. 126); Robert Milligan’s Scheme of Redemption (1868; pp. 142–43, with note 28; see also the bottom of p. 125); and B. W. Johnson (pp. 173–74): “He mentions no Disciples scholars. Even his brief discussion of Acts 2:38, linchpin text in the Disciples schema since Scott’s Gospel Restored and Campbell’s Christian System, does not refer to Scott or Campbell but cites the German scholar Meyer. Thus, his volume is not Disciples propaganda” (173).

So, the insular reading strategy with which I am familiar—“read only our authors!”—does not characterize our nineteenth-century forerunners. If I were to make an argument for the more recent insular reading strategy, I guess I would say the following: Church Bible class teachers, who are almost always theologically uneducated, might not recognize the problematic doctrines put forward by a Presbyterian or Catholic or atheist, but they are perhaps familiar with the issues that they would consider problematic that might be broached by a member of the Churches of Christ. I myself, in my role as Bible class coordinator at church, do not follow this line of thinking, but I suppose that it might be the way others reason it out. Of course, as everybody knows, a reader will encounter all sorts of dangerous nonsense in books published by authors in Churches of Christ, so the insular reading strategy won’t protect you there. But maybe a member of the Churches of Christ would be more likely to recognize the dangerous nonsense from our own folks?

More Notes

I conclude with some random notes that I want to preserve.

Most of the early restorers kept a diary in Latin, including Barton Stone (p. 11), Walter Scott, and Alexander Campbell (pp. 56, 57). I was surprised that Stone also picked up Greek and French (p. 11) and later some Hebrew. He used the KJV but sometimes criticized it. Stone exhibited no awareness of modern critical scholarship in relation to the authorship of biblical books or other matters.

According to Boring, historical criticism is necessary for the unity of the church, and thus for theology (414, 427). I wonder what Brad East would say to this.

We should lean into our own tradition, our historical situatedness (418).

At the same time, we should recognize the whole history of the church for 2000 years as our history, our tradition (412).

Boring discusses the meaning of belonging to the church (424). We trust our ancestors in this matter; we are humble, not insisting that we could do a better job.

The second paragraph of chapter 3 is important. Especially: “The First Generation Disciples had been aware of philosophy and the categories of philosophical thought. It was the second and following generations that had grown up only in the American Disciples tradition that was oblivious to philosophy, and they supposed they were devoid of it. The Second Generation thus had a naiveté the First Generation did not have” (p. 115).

Robert Milligan in Scheme of Redemption…

proceeds a step further and declares the Jews never understood their revelation, that it was exclusively for Christians. In this he follows the early Christian Epistle of Barnabas, which he considers an authentic letter written about 72 C.E. by the companion of Paul. (SR 421)

Wow, that’s crazy. Milligan doesn’t spend much time on it, but he does indeed attribute the Epistle of Barnabas to the companion of Paul. I wonder how common that opinion was in the late nineteenth century. Here’s the image from p. 421 of Milligan’s book.

Milligan is quoting there Barnabas 15.8–9.

Conclusion

Very much worth reading and taking copious notes, Eugene Boring’s Disciples and the Bible offers a great education on one angle of the reception of the Bible in the Stone-Campbell Movement.

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