Disclaimer for this post: I’m trying out ideas here, and I have no particular expertise in Church of Christ history or in patristics. I do, however, have a fair amount of experience with how intellectuals in the Church of Christ think and study today. Hopefully what I suggest here can be a worthwhile point of reflection and start some discussion among my friends who know more than I do about history.

From what I know of the history of the Church of Christ, one of our founding points was the desire to overcome the disunity caused by creeds and fine points of theological dogma and to unite in Christ. Alexander Campbell, along with others, reasoned that the Bible should serve as the source of unity for Christians, since creeds had aimed to be derived from Scripture anyway.

Whether such a plan could ever work is not the topic of this post. Instead, I want to consider one of the corollaries of having the Bible as the sole foundation for Christian doctrine: namely, that Churches of Christ came to reject “tradition” as lacking authority for the church, and ultimately as an influence that was unnecessary at best and ungodly at worst. This attitude has sometimes been defended by quoting Matt 15:9 (which quotes Isaiah): “in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

The point from Matthew is well taken in my opinion, a good warning to guard against tradition turning into crude dogma. Yet a crucial part of the church’s tradition is the teachings of church fathers through the centuries who studied scripture, reflected on it, and developed theology for the church’s practice. Some of these figures, like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, are surely among the greatest thinkers who ever lived. And both of these men, along with countless others, studied and preached from Scripture, believing that God would lead the church in large part through the study of Scripture and careful reflection among Christians. They read the scriptures theologically, seeking ways to understand the faith in changing cultures.

I have no doubt that many Church of Christ members over the years have read these theologians and learned from them, yet until very recently in my lifetime there has been very little impetus to learn from what the church father taught. The exception to this would be very early Christian texts, since they can potentially help us understand the ideas of the most primitive church. But on the whole, and especially as we move into the third century and beyond, Church of Christ scholars have given little attention to Christian theology. The church fathers might be objects of historical interest, but from what I can tell they have rarely been sought as a source of truth.

But here’s the problem: Alexander Campbell may have been intellectually rigorous, but he was no Augustine or Aquinas. That is not to negate his importance, but rather to point out that Campbell‘s work has not provoked the countless academic dissertations that have engaged the writings of the church fathers from ancient times, the middle ages, and the Reformation.

My point is not to bemoan some lack of prestige for the Church of Christ tradition, but rather to notice that the rejection of Christian tradition meant that virtually all Church of Christ scholars interested in theology went into the study, specifically, of Bible. When I started at ACU, they didn’t have a theology department; they had a bible department. My youth ministry degree didn’t require so much as an introduction to Christian theology, but it did require a year and a half of Greek as well as introduction to exegesis. Bible was the focus of theology in the church, and so it was the focus of theology in the academy.

So here’s the problem: as long as the Church of Christ resisted historical-critical readings of Scripture, it could do biblical theology that would benefit the church. But as scholars have come to sense that reading the Bible without reference to history is naive, they have had only one way to turn to make their studies more rigorous: mainline Bible scholarship. Which means, historical-critical scholarship.

The problem is, historical-critical scholarship (which I am learning to do professionally) works on the assumptions of historiography –– that is, that Scripture cannot be assumed to do anything miraculous like predict the future. If a historical critic claims the Bible as the word of God, he or she nevertheless treats it academically as essentially the words of humans.

In most Christian traditions, these historical studies are passed along to academic theologians, who reflect upon the new findings in light of the centuries of Christian theological thought. These theologians try to incorporate difficult new historical conclusions with a deep understanding of how the church has read scripture theologically through nineteen centuries.

In the Church of Christ, we have had no such mediator between scriptural study and truth. I know from experience that a Church of Christ Bible scholar has almost instant credibility when he or she walks into a church. People of course don’t simply accept what they are told. However, to the extent that Bible scholars can persuade people of historical facts about the Bible, they can tend to persuade those people about truth.

Compare that with a Catholic or Calvinist church. They take Christian tradition very seriously (perhaps too seriously at times), and they have fleets of scholars trained in thinking carefully about the theological traditions that their churches ascribe to. They have Bible scholars as well, who (ideally, at least) have conversations with theologians to try to shape theology according to Scripture. But the key point I want to raise is that the scholars who study Christian tradition typically do so as Christians. And more importantly, the great works of scholarship they study in their field are typically done by Christians, from a Christian perspective, seeking truth.

Returning to Churches of Christ: our scholars typically study the Bible, which means that we study authorities whose work is based largely on historical-critical scholarship. Such scholarship is often done by Christians, but it need not be. The biblical studies guild boasts excellent cooperation between Jews, Christians, and agnostics. Furthermore, historical-critical scholarship is not carried out from a Christian perspective. Instead, as I have mentioned, it is based on totally naturalistic assumptions. I can’t publish an historical reconstruction of Scripture that depends on God having done something. We work to establish historical facts based on surviving evidence, but truth claims are considered prejudicial, not essential to what we do.

I’m overstating things a bit. Bible scholars can often maintain a strong faith while doing historical-critical work, and plenty of Bible scholars find ways to make their biblical work theological. Furthermore, Church of Christ schools like ACU have worked hard in recent years to expand studies of Christian theology and history, as well as philosophy. Historical-critical study is important and necessary.

(To add a note to this post on further reflection, I should mention the Restoration Theological Research Fellowship as an example of CofC scholars doing serious theological work for the sake of the church. The RTRF met at the Society of Biblical Literature meetings each year from 1994-2002 and 2004-2007, and the scholars involved in those meetings could no doubt give an account of much more theological work than I was cognizant of when I wrote this post. I hope this post can still raise points worth considering, even if my own perspective is more limited than it should be.)

Yet the point remains: those who accept tradition welcome great Christian thinkers (who read scripture theologically) as primary dialogue partners in the effort to understand the truth of Christ and to shape church practice. Churches of Christ, by rejecting tradition, have unwittingly created a situation where most of our scholars learn about our sole theological texts primarily from scholars whose work aims to achieve the same results that an agnostic would reach studying the same text.

When most of a church group’s theologians are trained primarily by non-believers, it’s not difficult to imagine problems.