I recently read the book called Disciples and the Bible (1997) by Eugene Boring, owing to my interest in biblical interpretation within the Stone-Campbell Movement. Boring, who died a couple years ago, was a part of the Disciples of Christ all his life. I myself am a lifelong member of the Churches of Christ. It is obvious from reading this book that Boring was glad he was not within the Churches of Christ, and I myself am glad I’m not in the Disciples of Christ. We’re both content with our own location. Still, we’re both heirs of the Stone-Campbell Movement, and so in the comments below I sometimes use the first-person plural pronoun “we” to signal the heritage that Boring and I share. The “official” date when the two groups parted ways (i.e., the split in the Stone-Campbell Movement) is 1906.
Review of Eugene Boring, Disciples and the Bible (1997)
First things first: I love this book. I love Eugene Boring’s approach to the role of Scripture in the church. I love his respect for historical criticism, and his point that historical criticism is ecumenical. I want to think about that point, and I want to think about it in light of the criticisms leveled against historical criticism from the church, from those who are concerned historical criticism is insufficiently theological to be a Christian reading strategy (for examples from within Churches of Christ, see Brad East and Keith Stanglin). I think I agree that it is insufficiently theological, but the location from which I agree with that point is from Team Boring. I love other things about the book, not least his historical approach—that is, the conviction that to figure out where we are and where we need to go, we need to understand how we got here—and as a part of that historical approach I love his account of the development of the Five-Finger Exercise. I love the view of the biblical canon that he explicates in the final chapter (pp. 423–26).
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My favorite part of the book may be his fourth prescription in the final chapter, on the meaning of our pre-baptismal confession, and my least favorite part of the book may be his fifth prescription, his suggestion for a new five-finger exercise. But before continuing in this vein, let me tell you about the book.
Author and Book Basics
First, the author: M. Eugene Boring died as an old man on June 27, 2024. He retired as a New Testament professor from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. He earned his PhD from Vanderbilt.
The book, published by Chalice Press—a denominational publishing house connected to the Disciples of Christ—covers biblical interpretation in the Stone-Campbell Movement, from the days of Stone and Campbell, until Boring’s own day (so, about 200 years), with some hopes and direction for the future.
I’ve owned Boring’s book for 15 years, and it has languished on my shelf. Finally I can say that I’ve read it, and I’m glad I did. I learned a lot.
The Main Point of the Book
This is a different book than what I expected, but I should have expected what it is. I thought Boring’s book would be something like the more recent book by John Mark Hicks on biblical interpretation. I guess they are somewhat alike, but the two scholars certainly care about different aspects of the history of interpretation. Hicks is a historical theologian with expertise in the post-Reformation period, and he is great at tracing the intellectual currents influencing Alexander Campbell and others and especially their hermeneutical approaches. More to the point, Hicks is a lifelong member of the Churches of Christ and—not to put words in his mouth, but I imagine he might say—a recovering legalist. He is interested in how a movement aimed at church unity and renewal based on a fresh reading of Scripture became bogged down in legalism.
Boring is a biblical scholar, and more to the point, a lifelong member of the Disciples of Christ, which is self-consciously a mainstream Christian denomination. and thus a much more liberal group than the Churches of Christ. As you know if you’re at all familiar with the Disciples of Christ, and as Boring documents, for a century now the Disciples have essentially been fully integrated into the Academy and have played the game as well as anyone. The game is critical biblical scholarship, and the only rule is that you should not allow your faith to influence your reasoning. Boring didn’t grow up in a legalistic church; he grew up in a church—I imagine—that barely believed in Scripture, that openly expressed disagreement with the Bible, that harbored, and vocally expressed, serious misgivings about the resurrection of Jesus. Boring set himself the task of trying to figure out how a movement aimed at church unity and renewal based on a fresh reading of Scripture gave birth to a denomination whose leaders sometimes seem more committed to a historical reading of the Bible than to a theological appropriation of life-giving Scripture.
That this framing accurately describes Boring’s project becomes clear late in the book, starting especially in chapters 9 and 10, when he describes the Fourth Generation of Disciples in the middle of the twentieth century, the time when critical biblical scholarship fully dominated biblical interpretation in the denomination. In chapter 9, Boring describes—among others—the New Testament scholar S. Vernon McCasland as someone who had a genuine faith that could not be detected from his writings on the Bible. His faith and his biblical scholarship are in separate categories, and never the twain did meet. In the same chapter, he briefly describes Jack Finegan, another New Testament scholar. Boring says about Finegan:
He fits the McCasland type that threatened to become the dominant paradigm in the Fourth Generation. Whether it will continue to prevail remains to be seen. (347)
In chapter 10, Boring describes a mid-century committee of denominational scholars called The Panel of Scholars, that published a significant trilogy of books in 1963, charting a course for the Disciples of Christ. Again, this was 1963. Boring was ordained as a Disciples pastor in 1957, and he began teaching New Testament at Phillips University in Tulsa in 1967, so this Panel of Scholars was happening right at the time that Boring was launching his career. According to Boring, the Panel of Scholars affirmed the authority of the Bible, “not in terms of propositional revelation or verbal inspiration, but in terms of personal encounter with the God who speaks through the Bible” (357). Most of these scholars adopted a neo-orthodox view of Scripture, whereas, says Boring, “most of the denomination remained locked in the false alternatives of the older liberalism (many of the denomination’s leaders) and the older conservatism (many laypeople and pastors)” (358). He continues:
The authority of the Bible is genuinely affirmed [by The Panel of Scholars] but no longer functions in the same central manner as it had in previous generations. Though the Bible is quoted relatively often, there is remarkably little exegesis, and no exegetical essays as such. Symptomatic of the Disciples mind is the phenomenon that there is a fairly complete index to the three volumes of names and topics, but there is no scripture index. (358)
This is the situation Boring sought to explain. And it is the situation he sought to correct. Boring is not a fan of doing historical criticism of the Bible without reference to faith. He parenthetically and snarkily comments that the believing church is positioned to do historical criticism better than Christian “insiders who pretend to be ‘objective’ outsiders” (358). In the final chapter of the book, the following sentences appear all in italics, to emphasize “the centrality of the Bible.”
This is the central issue. Disciples have always assumed or affirmed that the content of the faith is identical with or inseparable from the message of the Bible. This centrality of the Bible for articulating the meaning of the faith is especially crucial for a denomination that has distanced itself from creeds and tradition. (p. 417)
This is not a book about command, example, and necessary inference (mentioned briefly a few times, e.g., pp. 229, 243). If that’s the book you want, you’ve got options. I’d probably recommend starting with the book by Hicks mentioned earlier. Boring’s book is about how historical criticism came to be the dominant mode of biblical interpretation in the denomination called the Christian Church.
Structure of the Book
Boring chronicles five generations of Disciples interpreters, and he gives an overview in the brief introduction. The first generation is a double-generation, lasting 60 years, from the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery(1804) to the death of Alexander Campbell (1866). I find it interesting that Barton Stone goes unmentioned in the introduction, though the whole movement is dated from the demise of the Springfield Presbytery. Stone’s name is the first one in the title of the first major chapter.
Anyway, the fifth generation started in 1968, so this book came out at the tail end of that generation, and Boring wonders whether there would be a sixth. Well, we’re in the sixth.
The generations that would be most interesting to people in Churches of Christ would of course be the first, second, and third.
Historical Criticism in the Stone-Campbell Movement
As I said, our author is a biblical scholar and his concern is with comparing biblical interpretation in his faith tradition over the past two centuries to the approach taken by biblical scholars, which is (in his mind) the right approach. According to Boring, Alexander Campbell was fully on board with biblical scholarship to the extent that he understood it.
Boring takes a somewhat teleological perspective in tracing the evolution of the Disciples’ appropriation of the Bible in terms of resistance or embrace of higher criticism. In other words, we have now gotten interpretation right (= historical criticism), and we can trace the history of how we came to this correct view. It reminds me of the saying I heard somewhere, “The arc of history is long but it bends toward us.”
Aside from teleology, Boring is also engaged in a project of restoration: making the Stone-Campbell Movement great again. The first generation of restorers was the best, especially Alexander Campbell; the second generation a step removed, and the third generation inferior still. You might recall Hesiod’s generations in Works and Days, first gold, then silver, then bronze. It is in the third generation, the bronze generation, the worst generation, where we get J. W. McGarvey, the great villain of Boring’s account.
As in Hesiod, so also in Boring’s account, the fourth generation represents an improvement, a return to Campbell’s principles of critical biblical interpretation, and Boring himself is in the fifth generation, which represents a further restoring of Campbell’s ideals. Boring ends the book by looking forward to the sixth generation, the one in which we are now living.
I cannot comment on what all Boring might have misinterpreted about the history of the Disciples. It is outside my field. It is also outside his field, so I suspect that he got some things wrong, or, let us say, that the way he framed some issues would not be how the majority of Stone-Campbell historians today would frame those same issues. But that’s my guess.
I can say that I found his discussion of McGarvey to be interesting, mostly because of how negative it was. When I was a student at Freed-Hardeman, McGarvey was a hero, and I acquired several of his books at that time. Boring even accuses McGarvey of anti-German xenophobia (235 n. 14), which is a charge not borne out by the citations provided by Boring. And I can correct one comment Boring made about the reception of McGarvey’s commentaries on Acts, but I’ll save that for a later post.
I found it interesting that Boring had an altogether more positive interpretation of Alexander Campbell than did Richard Hughes in the original edition of his magisterial history of Churches of Christ, called Reviving the Ancient Faith, that was published nearly simultaneously with Boring’s book. Boring the liberal Bible scholar and member of the liberal denomination Disciples of Christ seems to represent Alexander Campbell as the forerunner of liberalism, whereas Richard Hughes the American historian and a progressive member of the traditionalist Churches of Christ seems to represent Alexander Campbell as an ornery conservative and the fountainhead of all that is wrong with Churches of Christ.
This distinction between different ways of receiving Campbell’s legacy arises explicitly at the end of the chapter on the Churches of Christ (p. 303), where Boring says that Tom Olbricht misinterpreted Campbell’s “facts” as something that Olbricht himself was abandoning. According to Boring: “Actually, Olbricht’s emphasis is something of a recovery of Campbell’s ‘facts’ understood not merely as objective data that can be used as grist for a rationalistic mill, but the ‘mighty acts of God in history’ as the content of faith rather than theories and doctrines.”
Boring on the Churches of Christ
The chapter on biblical interpretation in Churches of Christ (ch. 8) is about 35 pages long. It is the last chapter of the section dealing with the so-called Third Generation of Disciples scholars.
Let me tell you what Boring does in this chapter. He divides the nineteenth and twentieth century into four periods, or, actually, he divides the twentieth century into three periods and sets it alongside the nineteenth century. Since the nineteenth century of the Churches of Christ is shared with the Disciples of Christ, he spends little time on it in this chapter, discussing only David Lipscomb for a few pages.
Lipscomb cannot be dismissed as an ignorant bigot, but his approach to the Bible does represent that sectarian mentality that will not enter into discussion with denominational and academic outsiders, looks only at the Bible as though its meaning were transparent, unaware of his own hermeneutical lenses through which he interprets, and tends to regard the Bible as a book of law by which every Christian act must be “authorized.” (277)
This shows where Boring’s interest lies when he examines biblical interpretation in Churches of Christ. Even here he barely mentions command, example, and inference. What he wants to know is whether a particular person, such as Lipscomb, is insular, in the sense of talking only to members of his own group, or whether he writes for a wider world. Boring wants to know whether an interpreter perceives the problems in the text of the Bible that have become obvious with the rise of historical biblical criticism. In other words, Boring views publications through two sets of lenses: the historical-critical lens, and the Stone-Campbell lens. He asks: does a particular specimen of biblical interpretation address only a Stone-Campbell context, or is it speaking competently to the wider world, whether people of faith or not?
After the 1906 split, the next forty years for the Churches of Christ are labeled by Boring “Isolation,” and the period is addressed in merely two pages, attempting to show that the concerns addressed in the period were specific to Churches of Christ, concerns such as the use of instrumental music in worship.
Then we have seven pages covering the quarter century leading up to 1970, which Boring labels the “Beginnings of a Renaissance.” At the beginning of this period, Lemoine Lewis, with Harvard PhD in hand, took up a post at Abilene Christian University and started encouraging his students to pursue graduate studies at elite universities. “This development, which had occurred a long generation earlier among the Disciples, and was one of the contributing factors to the split, now occurred among the Churches of Christ on a grander scale than had been the case among Disciples of the 1890s” (282).
But it’s only the beginnings of a renaissance, and the major example chosen by Boring for this period is J. D. Thomas, another ACU faculty member with a PhD from an elite university—the University of Chicago—who comes off as fully committed to the traditional style of interpretation with which he grew up, as if his graduate education merely conferred a credential without shaping his approach to the Bible.
Finally, the last thirty years of the twentieth century are labeled “Entering the Mainstream,” and Boring takes fourteen pages summarizing and critiquing the work of such scholars as Everett Ferguson, John Willis, Tom Olbricht, and Allen Black. Again, he wants to know how Church-of-Christ-y they are, or how open they are in accepting the dominant critical views that would seem problematic to a fundamentalist. For each of the named writers, Boring finds that they disguise their Church-of-Christ-iness but they are often insufficiently critical for Boring’s taste.
We’re now thirty years on from Boring’s evaluation of scholarship in Churches of Christ, and I wonder what he would make of the situation today. I wonder how he would evaluate my own writing. I’m not sure that I would come off any differently than the great names of the previous generation, but I think a difference might be that I am comfortable mentioning difficulties in the biblical text for which I have no solution. It seems to me that people in the pew, at least the ones who might read my books, accept that such difficulties exist. The scholarship of the generation of Ferguson and Willis and Olbricht has filtered down, I suspect.
In 1997, Boring began his “Concluding Observations” in ch. 8 with the comment:
While it is unclear to what extent the theological renaissance among scholars has permeated or will permeate the bulk of pastoral leadership and local congregations, the intellectual leadership of the Churches of Christ have rediscovered and reaffirmed theology, tradition, and a critical approach to biblical interpretation. (p. 303)
Yes, and the process continues.
Tracking Down Thomas Campbell’s Self-Identification as Calvinist
One interesting quotation of Thomas Campbell appears on p. 241. Unfortunately Boring does not provide a citation of a writing of Campbell himself, but of a secondary source, the 1954 book by Lester G. McAllister called Thomas Campbell: Man of the Book (St. Louis: Bethany). That is disappointing of Boring because the quotation from Campbell is inherently interesting to any reader of Boring’s book, and it would have been helpful to have a direct citation of Campbell to facilitate checking the original context. For this is the quotation where, in 1828, Thomas Campbell says: “I am a Calvinist,” and he disavows being a “restorationist” (on this latter word, see Boring’s note).
A trip to the library showed that McAllister himself did not directly cite Thomas Campbell but another book, one published by A. S. Hayden in 1876 and called History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (p. 168). Actually it is mis-cited by Mcallister; the book was published in 1875 and it is called Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio. There I see that the original source of this quotation by Campbell seems to be a letter, dated April 6, 1868, written by Aylett Raines to the book’s author, A.S. Hayden, to describe his participation in the 1828 meeting of the Mahoning Baptist Association in Warren, Ohio. So, not a direct source for Campbell, but a report of an 1828 conversation between Aylett Raines and Thomas Campbell, and the report is from Raines in a letter written forty years later. I’m not saying that Aylett Raines misrepresented Campbell, but it’s possible.
Concluding Chapter
I love Boring’s last chapter, 50 pages diagnosing the ills of biblical interpretation within his denomination and prescribing some remedies. Boring has uncovered aspects in the Disciples tradition of Bible reading that he thinks have rightfully been abandoned in his denomination (pp. 412–13), other aspects of the tradition that are in good health among the Disciples (pp. 413–16), and some things that are struggling for survival (pp. 416–17)—and then he writes some prescriptions, which takes up the final 30 pages. These would all be good conversation starters for believing Bible students.
Rightfully abandoned:
* uncritical views of the Bible
* the particular brand of restorationism dependent on uncritical views of the Bible. Here, Boring cites somebody named Colbert S. Cartwright, who in 1987 wrote about the, in Boring’s phrasing, “liberating effect of abandoning restoration that now opened the door to the history of the whole church as our own history and tradition.” Yes, I love that, and this resonates a great deal with Leonard Allen, In the Great Stream (2021). I myself don’t want to abandon restorationism, and Boring himself not only critiques the concept of restorationism but also gestures toward a helpful way of appropriating the impulse, for which he cites Mark Toulouse.
* Church = Kingdom
* Imprisonment of the Holy Spirit within Scripture
* the traditional Disciples “plan of salvation” as the key to reading Scripture
Preserved in Good Health:
* Unity, ecumenism
* populism
* love of God
* critical
* historical emphasis. Here he sees a recent emphasis (Leander Keck, et al.) on the historical Jesus rather than simply the Gospels
* “Disciples canon”
Struggling for Survival:
* churchly orientation of biblical study (as opposed to purely academic)
* holistic view of Scripture
* centrality of the Bible in the church
Each of these points deserves much more thought and discussion, which will be—Lord willing—never-ending. We can be grateful to have Boring’s own contribution to that conversation in such a helpful, well-presented, and provocative volume.
I have more to say about this book, so expect another dispatch on it. (Part 2 is now here.)
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