The Church of Christ As Religious Minimalism
But the destruction of this ancient world, the collapse and disintegration of the Roman Empire and its half burial under the Islamic conquests, brought this ancient civilization to an end. Christians living after the Sack of Rome in AD 410 panicked. They’d assumed the Christian Mediterranean had reached a stasis that would bring about the millennia of Christ’s reign and perfection of the world. The shock of history, their realization that the end of history had not arrived, destroyed their confidence and forced them to integrate their worldview with the surrounding Germanic people’s who increasingly intruded upon their world.
The result of this integration was the Germano-Latin synthesis that came to define Europe and Christendom down to modern times (but began to be displaced by liberalism in the 1700s). This synthesis, however, changed many things about ancient Christianity and added many trappings as missionaries attempted to render Christianity intelligible to a Germanic people who knew nothing of the Jews, nothing of the Greek philosophers, and nothing of the history of the world that early Christian converts had assumed as intellectual foundation. The same process was repeated with different results in the Slavic and Asian regions producing Russian, Coptic, and Nestorian Christianity (among others). Christianity had evolved a long way from the original form preached and performed by Jesus’ apostles, and much of this “innovation” had arguably been necessary to communicate with foreign civilizational worlds that had no understanding of the original presumptions of the Jews gathered to hear Peter’s first sermon.
However, by the time of the Reformation in Northern Germany Christianity had become so loaded down with the accumulations of fifteen centuries of innovation and synthesis that many Christians were beginning to question whether any of the original core of the faith had been preserved at all. The encrusted doctrinal complexity had been building innovations upon innovations, new dubious theological conclusions on old dubious theological conclusions, for far too long. The result was absurdities of belief and practice that could no longer be accepted. Martin Luther’s objection to the sale of indulgences is a relevant case study. The doctrine of Purgatory was dubious to begin with, and so when the Church decided to sell an escape from this hypothetical torture for the price of money it became too ridiculous to accept, in addition to reeking of corruption. Something had to break, and it did. It’s been said that civilizations often fail under the weight of their own complexity, and this seems to be what happened with Catholicism. Medieval Europe was arguably the most complex and powerful civilization in history, and its disintegration produced shockwaves we’re still feeling. Christianity fractured into thousands of denominations.
Several centuries later, in the American Midwest, Thomas Campbell and his son saw the fractured state of Christianity as a disaster that could only be remedied by a return to the original minimalist core of the faith. They set out a plan for unity that would both reconstruct the Catholic institutional unity of Christianity and strip away centuries of the accumulated complexity that had piled up as the church converted several civilizations to the faith and attempted to hold these disparate people’s inside a single institution. This ambitious plan was laid out in Campbell’s Declaration & Address of 1809. It was an attempt to stop the religious division and restart Christian history from a new beginning. Once again united, Christianity could regain strength, focus its energy, and resume its conquest of the world as a single bloc. Creeds would be swept away, and the Bible alone, the original source material, would become the unifying core upon which all could agree. Alexander Campbell believed that this unity revolution would inaugurate a thousand-year golden age of Christ’s reign on earth.
The Campbell’s vision, however, was soon compromised from within. The reaccumulation of dubious doctrines began in earnest. The polemics against creeds soon became creed unto themselves. Instead of written statements of faith, the Church of Christ began simplifying its views into unwritten creeds. Around 1827 Walter Scott conceived his five-step plan of salvation: hear, believe, repent confess, and be baptized and then claimed he’d actually reestablished the gospel after it was lost for a thousand years. The “five acts of worship” was also codified into a semi-creedal concept. Today, congregations fight and perish over doctrinal debates that seem utterly incomprehensible to the majority of outside Christians and are never explicitly discussed in the Bible.
Campbell’s minimalist revolution to restore New Testament Christianity has now largely devolved into another cause of Christian division, and has added to the complexity of our religious landscape. The Church of Christ has, in many ways, become just another layer of closed off theological discussion divorced from other bubbles of spiritual discourse. Our debates, and the problems now riling our fellowship, are often incomprehensible to other traditions, and we’ve lost our ability to set an example of unity and truth for the world.
The question we must now ask ourselves is whether minimalism is possible in the way that we’ve been practicing it. Is it possible to erase thousands of years of history and simply begin again? Or, is there a mystery in the complexities of the past that must be held in continuity with what we’re now attempting to build? The history of the twentieth century was one of radical breaks with the past, but that century ended up producing new horrors of war and conflict. The society’s that most radically attempted to break with the past and start afresh, the communist bloc centered on Russia, are now the leading advocates of returning to traditional worldviews rooted in ancient history. Can we, the Churches of Christ, find a way to blend minimalism with the historical past? Or, should we even attempt this synthesis?