Churches of Christ Beliefs Explained

1. What the Churches of Christ Believe

Churches of Christ believe that the New Testament alone supplies the pattern for the church, so they use no creed, no denominational headquarters, and no title beyond the one they read in Romans 16:16, where Paul writes that "the churches of Christ greet you." They teach that a person is saved when he hears the gospel, believes it, repents of sin, confesses Christ, and is immersed in water for the remission of sins, following Peter's answer at Pentecost in Acts 2:38. Every congregation governs itself under a plurality of elders and deacons, takes the Lord's Supper every Sunday, and sings a cappella because no New Testament text describes a church worshipping with instruments.

Those convictions hang together. They come from a single method, worked out on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century, which asks one question of every practice: does the New Testament authorise it? A practice is authorised by a direct command, by an approved apostolic example, or by a necessary inference from the text. Where the New Testament is silent, the movement's founding generation concluded, the church has no warrant to act. That method explains the a cappella singing, the weekly communion, the refusal of creeds, the absence of a headquarters, and the plain buildings with little in the way of religious imagery.

The name matters to members in a way outsiders often miss. "Church of Christ" is meant as a description rather than a brand, in the same way "the church at Corinth" describes rather than brands. Signs usually read "Church of Christ" with a town or street name above it, and many members will gently correct anyone who calls it a denomination. Understanding that instinct is the beginning of understanding everything else on this page.

This page covers the movement's history and its whole system of belief. Catholic baptismal doctrine, including what the sacrament does and why the Church baptises infants, is argued at length on our guide to the sacrament of baptism; here we set out the Churches of Christ position first, in its own terms, and answer it in the final section.

2. Barton Stone, Cane Ridge & the Springfield Presbytery

The first of the two streams that became the Churches of Christ began with Barton Warren Stone (1772 to 1844), a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky who had trouble with the Westminster Confession before he ever had trouble with a denomination. Stone was ordained in 1798 after telling the presbytery he accepted the Confession "as far as I see it consistent with the word of God," a qualification the examining ministers accepted and one that turned out to describe the rest of his life.

Cane Ridge, August 1801

Stone was the minister at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, when the camp meeting held there in August 1801 became the defining event of the Second Great Awakening in the West. Estimates of the crowd vary widely and none of them are reliable, but contemporaries described thousands of people camped in the woods over several days, with Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist preachers all speaking, sometimes at once from different stumps. The revival produced the physical phenomena that made it famous and controversial: falling, jerking, weeping, shouting.

Attendance figures for Cane Ridge come from participant estimates recorded at the time and were never counted. Historians of the Second Great Awakening treat the numbers as impressionistic, and this page therefore gives none.

What Cane Ridge did to Stone was theological. Preaching alongside ministers of other bodies, watching conversions that ignored denominational boundaries, he came to regard the Calvinist doctrine of a limited atonement and an unconditional election as an obstacle laid between the gospel and the hearer. If Christ died for all, the invitation is genuinely open to all, and the preacher can call anyone to respond. Stone's Presbyterian colleagues considered that a departure from the Confession, and they were right.

The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery

In 1803 Stone and several colleagues withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky and formed the Springfield Presbytery. Within a year they concluded that forming a new presbytery had reproduced the very thing they objected to. On 28 June 1804 they published The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, a short and deliberately witty document that dissolved the body they had just created. Its central clause reads that the Springfield Presbytery wills that it "die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large," and that the church of Christ resume "her native right of internal government."

The signatories, Robert Marshall, John Dunlavy, Richard McNemar, Barton W. Stone, John Thompson and David Purviance, took the name "Christian" and no other. Several of them later left for other movements, and Stone carried the work forward. The Christians of Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee had by the 1820s a settled shape: congregational, non-creedal, open in their preaching, and hostile to any name that divided believers.

That verse, and Christ's prayer in John 17:21 that his followers "may all be one," were the movement's founding texts. The Restoration plea was a plea for Christian unity, and its proposed instrument of unity was the New Testament read without a creed. Catholics should notice how much of the motive here is one we share, and reserve the disagreement for the method.

3. Thomas and Alexander Campbell

The second stream began with Thomas Campbell (1763 to 1854), a Seceder Presbyterian minister from County Armagh in Ireland who arrived in western Pennsylvania in 1807. Seceder Presbyterianism was itself a fragment of a fragment, and Campbell had spent years in Ireland working for the reunion of Scottish Presbyterian factions. In America he found the same divisions transplanted, and he found himself censured by his presbytery for serving communion to Presbyterians who were not of his particular party.

The Declaration and Address of 1809

Campbell withdrew, gathered sympathisers as the Christian Association of Washington, Pennsylvania, and in 1809 published the Declaration and Address, the founding document of his side of the movement. Its first proposition is the one that gets quoted: "the Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one." Its working rule was already circulating among his followers in a sharper form: where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.

That rule of silence is the hinge on which the whole later movement turns. Thomas Campbell meant it as a peace treaty: if believers stop binding on each other what Scripture does not bind, division loses its fuel. Read a second way, silence became a prohibition rather than a liberty, and by the end of the century it was being used to exclude practices Scripture never mentions. Both readings are present in the movement from early on, and the tension between them produced most of its later divisions.

Alexander Campbell

Thomas's son Alexander Campbell (1788 to 1866) arrived from Scotland in 1809, joined his father's work, and became the movement's dominant figure for fifty years. The Brush Run church was formed in 1811. When Alexander's first child was born in 1812 he studied the question of infant baptism, concluded that the New Testament knows only the immersion of believers, and was immersed with his family by a Baptist minister. That decision moved the group into loose association with Baptists, first the Redstone and later the Mahoning Baptist Association, an association that lasted until the Baptists' Calvinism and the Campbells' views on baptism and the covenants made the arrangement impossible. The separation came around 1830.

Alexander Campbell was above all an editor. He published The Christian Baptist from 1823 to 1830, a combative paper aimed at clergy, creeds and missionary societies, and then The Millennial Harbinger from 1830 until near his death, a calmer and more constructive journal. He debated the sceptic Robert Owen in 1829 and Bishop John Purcell of Cincinnati in 1837, and he founded Bethany College in Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1840. His 1809 inheritance plus his own reading of the covenants produced the movement's characteristic hermeneutic: the Old Testament is honoured as history and prophecy, and the New Testament alone legislates for the church.

Walter Scott and the five finger exercise

The evangelist who turned the Campbells' theology into a method anyone could preach was Walter Scott (1796 to 1861), appointed evangelist for the Mahoning Association in 1827. Scott reduced the response to the gospel to five items a listener could count on one hand: faith, repentance, baptism, remission of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. He is said to have taught children on his way into a town to hold up their hand and recite it, so the parents would hear it before he preached. The "five finger exercise" is the reason the plan of salvation is stated so crisply in Churches of Christ preaching to this day.

4. The 1832 Union and the 1906 Division

Stone's Christians and Campbell's Disciples united in January 1832 at Lexington, Kentucky, sealed by a handshake between Barton Stone and the Campbell evangelist "Raccoon" John Smith. The two groups had reached similar conclusions independently, and their differences (Stone was warmer, more revivalist and less precise; Campbell was systematic, editorial and legal in temper) were left standing rather than resolved. The union produced a fellowship that grew quickly across the frontier and that traced itself to no parent church in Europe, and the two names, Christian Church and Disciples of Christ and Church of Christ, were used interchangeably for decades.

What split it

Two questions divided the movement after the Civil War, and both were questions about authorisation rather than about doctrine in the usual sense.

• Missionary societies. The American Christian Missionary Society was founded in 1849 to coordinate evangelism. Opponents argued that the New Testament authorises the local congregation and nothing above it, so a society with a budget and a board is an organisation the church has no warrant to create.
• Instrumental music. Organs began appearing in wealthier urban congregations in the 1850s and 1860s. Opponents argued that the New Testament commands singing and never mentions playing, and that adding an instrument is adding to worship what God did not ask for.

The Civil War hardened the division along regional lines. The northern congregations were generally larger, wealthier and more comfortable with societies and organs. The southern congregations, poorer after the war and led by men such as Tolbert Fanning and David Lipscomb of Nashville, held the stricter line. Lipscomb's Gospel Advocate became the voice of that position.

1906

The separation was recognised officially in the United States religious census of 1906, when the Bureau of the Census listed Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ as two bodies. David Lipscomb had written to the census director stating that the two were in fact distinct, and the listing followed. No council decided the split and no document enacted it. The census simply recorded what had already happened in the congregations.

The three streams today

A second division followed in the twentieth century, this time on the other side of the 1906 line. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) adopted a formal denominational structure with a General Assembly in the restructure of 1968. Congregations that wanted the instrument but refused the structure separated as the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. Our guide to what the Disciples of Christ believe follows that other stream. Three bodies now descend from the one Restoration Movement.

This page is about the first row. When Americans say "Church of Christ" without qualification, particularly in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kentucky where the movement is strongest, they normally mean the a cappella Churches of Christ.

The distribution described here follows the movement's own directory, Churches of Christ in the United States, published periodically by 21st Century Christian of Nashville, which is the standard source for congregation counts and is compiled from congregational returns rather than from a government census.

5. Baptism for the Remission of Sins

Baptism is where Churches of Christ differ most sharply from the evangelical world around them, and the difference is easy to state. They teach that immersion in water is the point at which a penitent believer's sins are forgiven. Most of American evangelicalism treats baptism as a testimony to a forgiveness already received at the moment of faith; Churches of Christ locate the forgiveness in the act of baptism itself.

The texts they build on

The case is made from a cluster of passages read together, and any Catholic who has argued baptismal regeneration with a Baptist friend will recognise most of them.

• Acts 2:38. Peter's answer to the crowd at Pentecost who ask what they must do. Repentance and baptism, "for the forgiveness of your sins."
• Acts 22:16. Ananias to Saul: "Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name." Saul has already seen the risen Christ and already believes, and he is still told to wash his sins away.
• Romans 6:3-4. Baptism into Christ's death, buried with him, raised to walk in newness of life. The burial imagery is also their argument for immersion rather than pouring.
• 1 Peter 3:21. "This water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also." The verse says baptism saves, and the qualification that follows concerns the pledge of a clear conscience rather than the removal of dirt.
• Mark 16:16. "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved."
• Galatians 3:27. Those baptised into Christ have clothed themselves with Christ.

Preachers in the movement will typically press the sequence in Acts. Every conversion narrated in Acts ends in water, usually immediately, sometimes at night and in the open, and never with a sinner's prayer. Cornelius in Acts 10 receives the Holy Spirit before baptism and is baptised at once anyway. The eunuch in Acts 8 stops the chariot at the first water he sees. That pattern is the argument.

What they mean by immersion

Only immersion counts, on the grounds that the Greek verb means to dip or plunge, that Romans 6 describes a burial, and that the narratives require enough water to go down into. Sprinkling and pouring are treated as substitutes introduced later. Most congregations have a baptistry behind or above the pulpit, and baptisms often happen the same hour as the decision, at the end of a service, without a preparation course.

Rebaptism

Because the meaning of the act matters to them, many Churches of Christ congregations will ask a convert from another body to be immersed again if the earlier baptism was performed with a different understanding, on the reasoning that a baptism received as a symbol of prior salvation was not the baptism of Acts 2:38. This practice varies. Some congregations and many individual preachers hold that the validity of the act does not depend on the convert having a correct theology of it, and they accept a believer's immersion performed elsewhere. The disagreement inside the movement on this point is real and long-running.

6. The Plan of Salvation, Step by Step

The plan of salvation in Churches of Christ preaching is a numbered sequence, taught from the pulpit and often printed on a card. It descends directly from Walter Scott's five finger exercise and it structures how members think about conversion, evangelism and assurance.

1. Hear the gospel. Faith comes from hearing the message (Romans 10:17).
2. Believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (John 8:24, Hebrews 11:6).
3. Repent of sin, meaning a decided change of will and life (Acts 17:30, Luke 13:3).
4. Confess Christ before others (Romans 10:9-10, Matthew 10:32).
5. Be baptised by immersion for the remission of sins (Acts 2:38).
6. Live faithfully until death (Revelation 2:10, 1 John 1:7).

Why the sixth step matters

The sixth step is the one that separates Churches of Christ from the wider evangelical world almost as sharply as the fifth. They reject the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints in its popular form, the teaching often summarised as "once saved, always saved." A Christian can fall away, and the New Testament warnings in Hebrews 6:4-6, Hebrews 10:26-27, Galatians 5:4 and 2 Peter 2:20-22 are read as addressed to real believers about a real danger. Ongoing repentance, confession of sin to God and the prayer of the church restore a fallen member.

Catholic readers will recognise the shape of that concern. The Catholic tradition also holds that grave sin can sever a person from the life of grace and that perseverance to the end is a gift to be asked for rather than a possession to be assumed. Our guide to faith and works in Catholic teaching sets out the Catholic account of how grace, faith and obedience fit together, and our guide to what Catholics mean by salvation covers the wider question.

Where grace enters

Critics of the movement, including many Baptists, charge that a numbered plan turns salvation into a checklist of human works. Churches of Christ writers answer that every step is a response to grace rather than a payment for it, and they point out that being buried and raised in baptism is the most passive thing a person can do: the convert is carried down and lifted up by someone else. The charge and the answer have both been in print for over a century, and it is fair to state the answer whenever the charge is repeated.

7. No Creed but the Bible

Churches of Christ recite no creed, subscribe to no confession, and publish no statement of faith that binds a congregation. The slogan is old and blunt: no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, no name but the divine. A visitor will find no Apostles' Creed in the service and no denominational catechism in the classrooms, and a preacher who quoted a confession as authority would be doing something the tradition regards as a category error.

The reason behind it

Churches of Christ have no quarrel with the content of the historic creeds. They hold the doctrine of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, his virgin birth, bodily resurrection and future return, and would affirm every article of the Nicene Creed as true. Their objection is to the function a creed performs. A creed becomes a test of fellowship, a document written by men that decides who is in and who is out, and the Restoration reading of church history is that every such document has divided Christians who could have been united by the Scriptures alone. Thomas Campbell's peace proposal was to bind nothing on anyone that the New Testament does not bind.

Command, example, necessary inference

In place of a confession the movement uses a hermeneutic, usually stated as three ways a practice can be authorised.

• Direct command. An explicit instruction, such as the command to observe the Lord's Supper.
• Approved apostolic example. A practice the New Testament describes the apostolic churches doing with apparent approval, such as gathering on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7).
• Necessary inference. A conclusion the text requires even without stating it, such as the need for a container to hold the fruit of the vine.

Alongside these runs the law of silence. Where the New Testament neither commands nor exemplifies a practice in worship, the church may not adopt it. The distinction usually offered is between an aid to a command, which is permitted (a song book aids singing, a building aids assembling), and an addition to a command, which is not (an instrument adds a second kind of music to the singing that was commanded). Where that line falls has been argued inside the movement for a hundred and fifty years, and the arguments have produced most of its subdivisions.

How the argument runs with a Catholic

A Catholic will want to ask two questions at this point, and they are worth stating plainly rather than sharply. First, the New Testament is a set of books, and the list of which books belong in it is nowhere given inside those books; the canon was recognised by the Church, in the African councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 among others, and received by the whole Church thereafter. To hold the New Testament as sole authority is already to accept a decision the Church made. Second, Scripture itself commends the handing on of apostolic teaching in both written and spoken form: Paul tells the Thessalonians to hold to the traditions taught "whether by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Our guides to Sacred Tradition and the Bible and its canon develop both points.

A Churches of Christ reply is available and should be heard. They answer that recognising which books are apostolic is a historical judgement rather than an act of authority, and that a church which received the canon does not thereby acquire the power to add to it. The disagreement is genuine and it is not resolved by either side declaring victory over the other.

8. Why They Sing Without Instruments

Churches of Christ sing without instruments because they read the silence of the New Testament as a prohibition. The apostolic letters command singing and speaking to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, "singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord" (Ephesians 5:19, and similarly Colossians 3:16), and no New Testament passage shows a Christian assembly using an instrument. On the principle that worship requires positive authorisation, the organ or guitar is an unauthorised addition rather than a permitted aid.

The supporting arguments

Three further arguments are usually offered. The instruments of the Old Testament temple belonged to a sacrificial worship that has been fulfilled and set aside, so appealing to Psalm 150 is appealing to a covenant that no longer legislates. The early church sang without instruments for centuries, a historical claim that has real support in patristic sources, and organs entered Western worship only in the medieval period. And congregational singing without accompaniment makes every member a participant rather than an audience, which is a pastoral argument rather than a scriptural one and is often the one members feel most.

The result is worth hearing at least once. Four-part unaccompanied congregational singing, sustained across a whole assembly with no one leading from an instrument, is one of the genuine musical achievements of American Christianity, and the movement's shape-note and hymnal traditions are serious ones.

The Catholic view of the same question

The Catholic Church has never treated the silence of Scripture as a prohibition. Where God has not spoken, the Church judges the matter is left to the Church's prudence, guided by tradition and by the good of worship. Instruments are therefore permitted and, in the Latin rite, honoured: the Second Vatican Council's constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium 120, holds the pipe organ in high esteem as an instrument whose sound adds a wonderful splendour to the Church's ceremonies, while admitting other instruments with the approval of the competent authority.

One observation is worth adding for fairness in both directions. Unaccompanied singing is not a Restoration invention and it does not by itself prove the Restoration argument, since the Eastern Orthodox Churches sing their liturgy a cappella by ancient custom while holding a sacramental and hierarchical theology that Churches of Christ reject entirely. The practice and the principle behind it are separable.

9. The Lord's Supper Every Sunday

Churches of Christ observe the Lord's Supper every Sunday, without exception, and the practice is one of their most distinctive marks in the American Protestant landscape. The authorisation is Acts 20:7, where the disciples at Troas came together "on the first day of the week" to break bread, taken as an approved apostolic example, together with Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 11:23-29.

How it is done

Unleavened bread and the fruit of the vine (grape juice in nearly all congregations) are passed through the assembly in trays by men serving at the table, usually with a short scripture and prayer over each element. Any member may partake; the invitation is generally to any baptised believer present, and self-examination is left to the individual on the basis of 1 Corinthians 11:28. There is no ordained minister required for the table, because the movement recognises no priesthood distinct from the priesthood of all believers.

What they hold it to be

The prevailing understanding is memorial. The bread and the cup are emblems that direct the mind to Christ's body and blood, and the assembly proclaims his death until he comes. Some writers in the movement have argued for a stronger spiritual presence in the reception, closer to what Calvin taught, and Alexander Campbell himself wrote about the supper with warmth that goes beyond bare memorialism. The mainstream position remains that the elements do not change and that the act is a remembrance and a proclamation.

A Catholic reads Acts 20:7 with real recognition. The weekly gathering on the first day of the week for the breaking of bread is the Mass, and a Christian body that has kept a weekly communion when much of Protestantism moved to quarterly has held something the New Testament plainly shows. The disagreement is over what is received. The Catholic Church holds that the whole Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, is truly present under the appearances of bread and wine after the consecration, on the strength of Christ's own words at the Last Supper, the discourse in John 6:51-58, and Paul's warning that whoever eats and drinks unworthily sins against the body and blood of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:27). Our guide to the Real Presence in the Eucharist sets out that case with the patristic evidence.

10. Elders, Deacons & Congregational Autonomy

Every Church of Christ congregation governs itself. There is no bishop, no synod, no conference, no headquarters, and no office of any kind above the local church. Congregations cooperate voluntarily in supporting missionaries, colleges and publications, and any such cooperation is a matter of agreement rather than of authority.

The offices

Two offices are recognised, both taken from the qualification lists in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.

• Elders, also called shepherds, pastors, overseers or bishops, all treated as names for one office. A congregation appoints a plurality of them, never one alone, and they must meet the scriptural qualifications, which in most congregations are read as requiring a man who is the husband of one wife with believing children.
• Deacons, who serve under the elders in particular areas of work and who also meet a scriptural qualification list.

The preacher, usually called the minister or the evangelist, holds no office in this scheme. He is a member employed to preach and teach, and he serves under the oversight of the elders rather than over them. Calling him "the pastor" is a usage many members will correct, since pastor means elder and the elders are a body.

Women's roles

Most congregations restrict public leadership of the assembly, including preaching, presiding at the table and leading prayer before the mixed assembly, to men, reading 1 Timothy 2:11-12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 as binding. Women teach children and other women, organise much of the congregation's work, and in many congregations do a great deal that is invisible from the pew. A minority of congregations, mostly associated with the movement's larger universities and urban churches, have moved to expand women's public participation, and that question is currently one of the sharpest internal debates.

What autonomy costs and gains

The gain is that no distant office can impose anything on a congregation, and a corrupt leadership in one place cannot contaminate another. The cost is that there is no mechanism to resolve a dispute that a congregation cannot resolve itself, no body that can define a doctrine that is being lost, and no authority that can settle whether a new question is one on which Christians may differ. The movement's own history of division illustrates both sides honestly. Our guide to how the Christian denominations relate to one another places this pattern in the wider picture.

11. The Varieties Within the Movement

Churches of Christ are not uniform, and because there is no authority above the congregation the variations are permanent. The differences follow from applying the law of silence with different degrees of strictness, and most of them concern what a congregation may do with its collection or how it may organise its worship.

Mainstream congregations

The mainstream of the movement supports colleges, orphan homes, missionary works and radio or television programmes out of the congregational treasury, uses Bible classes divided by age, employs a full-time preacher, and often has a fellowship hall and a family life centre. This is what most Americans encounter under the name.

Non-institutional congregations

Sometimes called anti-institutional or, less politely, "antis," these congregations hold that the local church may support only what the New Testament authorises the local church to support. They therefore decline to send congregational funds to orphan homes, colleges or sponsoring-church arrangements, holding that individual Christians may give to such works while the church as a church may not. Many also object to church-provided meals and recreation on the same grounds. The division came to a head in the 1950s.

One-cup and non-Sunday-school congregations

Smaller groupings apply the pattern more strictly still. One-cup congregations hold that the single cup of the New Testament accounts requires a single literal vessel, so individual communion cups are an unauthorised innovation. Non-Sunday-school congregations hold that the assembly is not to be divided into separate classes and that women are not to teach in any assembled setting. These congregations are few and are concentrated in particular regions.

The International Churches of Christ

The International Churches of Christ is a separate body with its own history. It grew out of the Crossroads discipling movement in Florida and then the work of Kip McKean in Lexington, Massachusetts, from 1979, and it expanded rapidly through an intensive discipling system that assigned each member a personal discipler. Mainline Churches of Christ congregations disfellowshipped the movement, and the ICOC has been the subject of sustained criticism, including from former members, over the control exercised through the discipling relationship. The body reorganised after Kip McKean stepped down from its leadership in the early 2000s. It should not be treated as representative of Churches of Christ, and members of either group will say so. Our guide to how to tell a cult from a Christian church sets out the questions worth asking of any high-control group.

Race and the movement

Predominantly Black Churches of Christ form a substantial part of the movement, with their own preaching traditions, lectureships and institutions, including Southwestern Christian College in Terrell, Texas. Segregation shaped the movement as it shaped American Christianity generally, and the separate development of Black and white congregations within a single fellowship is part of the honest history.

12. Churches Often Confused With Them

Several unrelated bodies carry similar names, and the confusion is common enough that it is worth clearing in one place. A shared word in a name proves nothing about a shared history.

Two further clarifications save trouble. Churches of Christ are Trinitarian, so they belong on the other side of the line from the bodies covered in our guide to churches that reject the Trinity. And they are not charismatic: the movement is broadly cessationist, holding that the miraculous gifts served to confirm the apostolic message and ceased with the completion of the New Testament, which puts them at a distance from Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.

13. A Catholic Response

A Catholic response to the Churches of Christ should begin by naming the agreements, because they are larger than the surrounding evangelical world usually allows and because a conversation that starts with the disagreement will not get to them.

Where Catholics agree with them

• Baptism forgives sins. Both bodies read Acts 2:38 as meaning what it says. The Nicene Creed confesses one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, and the Catechism teaches that baptism forgives original sin and all personal sins (CCC 1263). Against the view that baptism is a mere symbol, Catholics and Churches of Christ stand on the same side.
• Communion every Sunday. The weekly breaking of bread on the first day of the week is apostolic practice, and a body that has kept it deserves credit for keeping it.
• Salvation can be lost. Both reject "once saved, always saved" and both take the New Testament warnings as addressed to believers.
• Unity is a command. The Restoration plea began from John 17:21 and 1 Corinthians 1:10, and the scandal of Christian division is a scandal a Catholic should also feel. Our guide to Catholic ecumenism covers how the Church pursues it.
• Works matter. The movement's insistence that faith which does not obey is not saving faith is close to James 2:24 and to the Catholic position set out in our guide to faith and works.

Where Catholics differ

Four disagreements are load-bearing, and each of them follows from the same root question about authority.

The great apostasy assumption

Restorationism presupposes that the church of the New Testament was lost and needed restoring. A Catholic answers that Christ promised the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16:18) and that the Holy Spirit was given to lead her into all truth (John 16:13), so a total failure requiring a nineteenth-century recovery is a claim about God's fidelity as much as about church history. The Church that recognised the New Testament canon in the fourth century is the same Church whose bishops taught baptismal regeneration and the Real Presence, and a restorationist who accepts her canon while rejecting her testimony is being selective about the same witness. Our guide to the great apostasy claim examines the argument in detail.

Infant baptism

Churches of Christ baptise only those who can hear, believe, repent and confess, which excludes infants. The Catholic Church baptises infants because baptism is God's work rather than the recipient's achievement, because whole households were baptised in Acts 16:15 and 16:33 and 1 Corinthians 1:16, because the covenant sign in Israel was given to infants on the eighth day (Colossians 2:11-12 draws the parallel to circumcision), and because Christ commanded that the children be let come to him (Mark 10:14). The practice is attested in the early Church: Origen calls it a tradition received from the apostles, and Cyprian's council in the third century treated the only live question as whether to wait until the eighth day. The full case is on our guide to baptism.

Sola scriptura and the law of silence

The deeper difference is the rule of authority. The Catholic Church holds that the Word of God comes to us in Scripture and in Tradition together, entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church (CCC 95 describes the three as so connected that none stands without the others). The law of silence, applied consistently, would forbid church buildings, hymnals, projected words, printed Bibles in translation and separate age-graded classes, and the aid-versus-addition distinction that saves those practices is itself a human tradition doing exactly the work the movement says human tradition may not do. That observation is offered as an argument rather than a jab, and Churches of Christ writers have wrestled with it seriously.

Orders and the sacraments

Because the movement recognises no ordained priesthood, it has no Eucharist in the Catholic sense and no sacrament of penance. The Catholic Church holds that the apostles handed on their office by the laying on of hands (2 Timothy 1:6, Titus 1:5) and that the authority to forgive sins was given by Christ to men he sent (John 20:23). Our guides to the Catholic priesthood and the sacrament of confession set out those claims.

How the Church regards their baptism

The Catholic Church judges the validity of a baptism by three things: water, the Trinitarian form commanded in Matthew 28:19, and the intention to do what the Church does in baptising. An immersion performed in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ordinarily satisfies all three, and a person received into full communion from such a background is not baptised again. Individual cases are decided by the diocese, which will look at how a particular baptism was actually performed, so anyone in this position should bring the question to a parish priest rather than settle it from a web page.

How to have the conversation

Anyone who lives in the American South will meet members of Churches of Christ, and they will often know their New Testament better than the Catholic they are talking to. Three suggestions. Concede the agreements first and mean it, particularly on baptism, because the concession is true and it changes the temperature. Ask where the table of contents of the New Testament came from, and wait for the answer rather than supplying it. And read the Fathers together: Justin Martyr's description of the Sunday assembly in his First Apology, written around the middle of the second century, describes a weekly gathering with readings, a presider, a Eucharist that the Christians of that generation did not regard as common bread, and deacons carrying it to the absent. That text belongs to both of you, and it is a better ground than an argument about organs.

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