Restoration Thought... Is Restoration Over?
Hope for salvation is in trusting and obeying Jesus Christ — not in being "right" on every issue brethren can concoct.
Edward Fudge
"Differences arose at once and still continue among the supporters of the 'Declaration and Address' as to the essential elements of primitive Christianity." So observed Charles A. Young. It is comforting to know that each man will account for himself to God. Yet this emphasizes the sobering responsibility of every person to examine himself, "whether he be in the faith."
The coming Day of Judgment will find us prepared, not on the basis of the "Declaration and Address," a Confession of Faith, or the words of any paper or man. Rather we will stand on the basis of our acceptance of and allegiance to the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth.
Even the idea of restoration will be misleading, unless we remember that we will be judged on the basis of obedience to Christ — the very same basis of judgment for Christians in the first century or any other.
Only to the extent to which that obedience leads are we justified in imitating the first century church or attempting to "restore" its ways. We are to be Christians first. Only then are we to be "restorers." Salvation is in Jesus Christ, as are life, hope and unity. All else must find its place around this principle truth.
"Who shall decide infallibly the application of every principle to each situation? Here is individual responsibility. Here is the reason we are not to judge one another in such cases. Here is why it is important that we realize our hope for salvation is in trusting and obeying Jesus Christ — not in being "right" on every issue brethren can concoct. If this were not the case we should need an infallible interpreter and an authoritative enforcer. Then there would be no congregational autonomy. There would be no individual conscience. There would be no need for either.
There is also the danger of going to the other extreme. One might become so unconcerned that he makes no effort to determine truth on given issues, even for application to his own personal life.
The old tendency to dogmatize as to matters of faith, to believe in opinions rather than facts, and to formulate speculations about the truth rather than to accept heartily the truth itself, has no doubt produced untold evils, and among these evils may be fairly reckoned the present tendency to be all things to all men, that by all means we may be nothing (W. T. Moore).
Our problem is not this, though, for the most part. Perhaps it is more beneficial that we be cautioned against over-conservatism. There is a tendency to make the truths taught by the previous generation the final standard and complete measure of orthodoxy today. There is always in this the danger that we will become stereotyped and dead; that through such rigid conformity we will lose our influence as a people who once denounced the "traditions of men" and urged others to let God be their guide instead of their ancestors.
Every generation finds those who seek to maintain the status quo. Content with the past, these individuals are quite sure that anything "new" to them must be wrong. These people, though honest, and sometimes influential, are also mistaken. When measured by the words of Christ it really makes little difference what David Lipscomb said about anything — or Alexander Campbell either! Good preachers do not become infallible when they die. What "faithful gospel preachers always stood for" is no better a rule than what "we have always practiced." Both should be measured by the word of God.
Perhaps Charles Young summed up the challenge of restoration when he wrote:
Every new assertion of Christian liberty has resulted in a new tyranny. Luther exercised the greatest liberty of thought personally, but it was lost to his followers. . . . Thomas Campbell exercised the greatest possible liberty, and would be bound only where the Scriptures bound him; but is it any surprise that there has been less liberty among his followers?
Where Luther stopped growing, . . . thought and life hardened into a fixed form. That which Luther was free to think in his life-time, the next generation was obliged to think, as a condition of fellowship in the Lutheran Church. There is danger that where Thomas and Alexander Campbell arrived in their movement to restore primitive Christianity, there those who gather around them shall stop.
Will we?