I’ve been saving the following article by Edward Fudge to share with you. When I “saved” it I didn’t realize it would be years before I shared it, but… that’s ok. Here it is:
THE PLAGUE OF PATTERNISM
Part 1 – Background
Aug 16, 2009
All Christians agree that Jesus is our pattern, and that healthy teaching consistent with trusting and loving him provides a secondary pattern for living as well (2 Tim. 1:13). This short gracEmail series is not about that. It is about an oddity and aberration that has marked the Christian tribe into which I was born and raised, and from which home base I now serve the larger body of Christ as well. That particular tribe is the Churches of Christ. The peculiarity is at once a doctrine, a way of reading the Bible and an approach to “doing church.” We can call it Patternism. Today, many Churches of Christ have left this peculiarity behind, the result of a gospel renewal that began in the early 1970’s. To speak more accurately, the knowledge of Jesus Christ as all-sufficient Savior has rescued these fine people from bondage, just as God delivered the Israelites from Egyptian slavery.
The Churches of Christ flowed from the merger of two 19th-century, back-to-the-Bible movements, led by three former Presbyterian preachers. The smaller movement resulted from the work of Barton W. Stone, who had been a participant in the famous Cane Ridge Revival. The larger movement was initiated by the father-son pair, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, who had emigrated from Scotland to America. The Campbells called for the restoration of “primitive Christianity,” which they defined primarily in terms of external details of the institutional church. Just as God provided Moses a detailed pattern for building the Tabernacle, said the Campbells, so he had provided an exact pattern for his people to follow when restoring the first-century apostolic church.
But there was a slight problem. It is true that God gave Moses voluminous and exact details for the Tabernacle and its furnishings (Exodus 25-40), and for the priests and sacrifices that would follow (Leviticus). It is significant, however, that the New Testament Scriptures do not include a book like Exodus or Leviticus. Indeed, when the writer of Hebrews refers to the “pattern” that God gave to Moses, he is making a contrast with the Christian order. He is not suggesting that Christians also have such a pattern for the church (Heb. 8:1-6).
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Part 2 — The ‘CENI-S’ jigsaw puzzle
Aug 18, 2009
The New Testament Scriptures contain numerous guiding principles for Christian believers, both individually and together in community. However, if we read Matthew through Revelation, we will never see anything faintly resembling the detailed instructions that God gave to Moses for building the Tabernacle. But pattern-seekers are very serious about serving God, which causes them to be both creative and persistent. “Surely a pattern is in there somewhere,” they reasoned, “even if it is not immediately obvious. Perhaps it is fragmentary and under the surface.”
And with that, they began to scour the New Testament Scriptures for scattered bits and pieces of any pattern that might be hidden there. They gathered a verse here and a phrase there. Occasionally, they picked up an entire paragraph. Then, when they believed they had found all the parts, they carefully assembled the pieces — like some giant jigsaw puzzle — to create their divine blueprint for the New Testament church. But for what did they look in their search? How did they recognize a pattern puzzle piece when they saw it?
Pattern puzzle pieces come in three shapes, according to Church of Christ pattern-seekers. Each piece bears the form either of an express command (“C”), an approved example (“E”), or a necessary inference (“NI”). But the picture on the completed puzzle is surrounded on four sides with a very thick border. According to the pattern-seekers, this means that every detail of church structure, worship, leadership, and ministry must be “authorized” by one of those puzzle pieces, or else it is unlawful. By their reckoning, silence does not mean consent. It means absolute prohibition (“S”). We will refer to this doctrinal system as “CENI-S,” an abbreviation for “command, example, necessary inference” and “silence.”
At this point, it is important for us to point out a crucial distinction. It is always a good thing (and there is never any harm) for anyone to ask sincerely, “What has God commanded?” or “For what has God commended others?” Nor is it bad to use our brains in seeking God’s will. But there is very great harm indeed in creating a human system of doctrine, and binding it on others as a test of Christian fellowship or as a condition of salvation. That is what I mean by “patternism.” That is what turns something inherently healthy into something that is foul and diseased. That is the “plague” that gives this little gracEmail series its name.
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Part 3 — A necessary plan that never worked
8/20/2009
We had as well face it straight on. The pattern-seekers, well-intentioned as they were, created something that the New Testament does not require, suggest or even envision. It is no wonder that their scheme of commands, examples and necessary inferences, and the underlying assumption that everything not “authorized” was automatically forbidden, has been a horrible disaster. From the very beginning, the “CENI-S” approach was hopelessly ambiguous, completely unworkable, and incapable of consistent application.
For example, most patternists dismissed as irrelevant some commands that were inconvenient (such as feet-washing) or shaped by culture (such as a holy kiss or a woman’s veil). They made other commands, originally intended for limited application (such as Paul’s Gentile collection for poor Judeans), into permanent, universal law. They declared some historical events, however incidental, to be binding as “approved examples” (such as Paul’s weekend bread-breaking at Troas). But they dismissed as unimportant other events recorded in the same biblical context (such as eating in an upper room).
Inferences which one person viewed as “necessary” were considered entirely unnecessary by others. Conclusions based on inductive reasoning were assigned a level of certainty that is logically possible only through deductive argument. Other conclusions, properly based on deductive reasoning, were nevertheless flawed because their premises included human assumptions instead of biblical propositions. The whole approach had been fabricated by uninspired men, and it had no moral power. Its survival required constant persuasion (at best) or political pressure (at worst).
About 35 years ago, I attended a lunch meeting of preachers who considered compliance with their pattern a necessity for faithfulness to God. As they were about to go their separate ways, a wise senior member warned the others, “If all the preachers and elders in our brotherhood suddenly died today, I am afraid there would be no faithful churches left within one generation.” To which I thought (and might have said aloud), “That is because your whole system originates with men. If it were from God, it would not have to be constantly propped up to survive.”
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Part 4 — Restorationism eclipses unity
8/22/2009
For Thomas and Alexander Campbell, pattern theology was primarily a way to restore the primitive church. The restoration of the primitive church was a means of uniting believers in all denominations. When believers united, the world would convert to Christ. The world’s conversion would trigger the beginning of the Millennium, which would climax 1,000 years later with the return of Jesus Christ (the Campbells were post-millennialists). But the Campbells’ dream was not to be. Historical events, particularly the American Civil War, proved to be more than their utopian theory could endure.
Without the Campbells’ series of cause-and-effect connections, the goal of restoring the primitive church gradually pushed aside the goal of Christian unity, and restorationism emerged as the reason for Churches of Christ to exist. In the process, pattern theology (“CENI-S”) increasingly became sectarian and legalistic, both in tone and in form. The problem was not a bad attitude or a defective application of principles. The problem was the two-part assumption that God had placed in the New Testament Scriptures a detailed and mandatory pattern for the true church, and that the “CENI-S” principles provided the key that was necessary for its discovery.
Patternism prevailed as the primary mindset for most Churches of Christ until about the mid-20th century. In its wake were at least six (some say as many as 20-25) sub-groups or mini-Church of Christ “brotherhoods,” each usually recognizing only its own members as fellow-Christians, or certainly as the only “faithful” ones. Most of the “regular members” (“clergy” and “laity” were not in their vocabulary) were decent, loving people. Most of their preachers were bivocational, sacrificial and devout. Yet, for members and preachers alike, “evangelism” often meant telling Christians in other denominations about “the New Testament church” (or “true church”), and “conversion” occurred when someone left another denomination and joined a Church of Christ.
By the end of the 1950’s, most larger, white, urban, American Churches of Christ were well into the process of abandoning pattern theology, in favor of a less institutionalized and more personal understanding of their faith. Patternism continued in many congregations that were either smaller, African-American, rural, or the products of church-plantings outside the USA, all of which tended to be dependent, traditionally-inclined and susceptible to authoritarian influences from outside. But an era was about to pass, and things would never be the same again.
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Part 5 — A very helpful book
8/25/2009
As measured by the patternism that traditionally characterized Churches of Christ before the 1950’s, the mainstream was on the wrong side of almost every disputed issue. The truth is that patternism’s logic did not really allow the whole parade of “innovations” — Sunday Schools, multiple communion cups, “located preachers,” fellowship halls, church kitchens, or support of benevolent or evangelistic institutions from the church treasury. Of course, if consistently applied, patternism also would have excluded church buildings, traditional “worship services,” permanent church treasuries, and patternistic preachers.
But patternism itself had been wrong from the beginning. It was foreign to the Bible, a distraction from the gospel, and a constant competitor with Jesus for top billing in sermons and debates. Among mainstream Churches of Christ with Sunday morning attendance of 200+ persons, congregations strongly advocating the “CENI-S” principles today likely represent a very small minority. The most diligent continuing proponents of this system of interpretation are a sub-group of churches who identify themselves as “non-institutional” — ironically, as it happens, since their separate existence is justified only by a thoroughly institutionalized view of the church and everything pertaining to it.
I close by mentioning a very helpful new book, titled A Call to Unity: A Critical Review of Patternism and the Command-Example-Inference-Silence Hermeneutic, by Barry L. Perryman (Lander, Wyo.: IRM Press, soft cover, 83 pages, 2009). An associate professor of biotechnology at the University of Nevada-Reno, Dr. Perryman inspects the “CENI-S” hermeneutic from beginning to end in light of the Scriptures. It will come as a surprise to some to learn that Jesus himself rejected the first-century version of patternism’s principles, or that patternism can become what Paul called “another gospel.” For more information about Call to Unity, contact the author directly at bperryman1296@charter.net .
Edward Fudge
August 2009