What The Bible Teaches About Its Own Silence

Theme: What The Bible Teaches About…
Speaker: Dub McClish, Editor of The Gospel Journal
Date: Date: March 15, 2004, Monday Evening Worship Service - (During a Gospel Meeting March 14 Through 17, 2004, at the Northeast church of Christ, Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Main Scripture References: Many Scriptures are in the body of the sermon to substantiate the Principle of Inclusion and Exclusion: We speak where the Bible speaks; we are silent where the Bible is silent.
Centered on the Text: 2 Timothy 3:16-17 All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. (KJV)

The study we’re going to do tonight is one that I consider to be of very, very great importance, and I want to enlist your earnest attention this evening. I want to make two or three statements by way of a forward. I will need to be using some notes tonight, because I will be reading from some quotations that I do not have committed to memory. We will be studying some church history tonight, but I hope it will be interesting to you. It should be. You may think for a while that we’re not going to get to any Scripture tonight, but just stay with me. We will get to the Scripture. We’re going to try to lay a good bit of groundwork in leading up to it.

Our subject tonight is one that, in my judgment, is not studied nearly enough among the Lord’s people today. And consequently, many of the younger generation, or generations, have grown up not hearing and, consequently, not understanding this material and its significance.

I want you to go back with me, as a beginning point, to the year 1809. In the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, near the town of Washington, Mr. Abraham Alters owned a farm. And in the farmhouse, he had a group of people meeting, and he’d invited a man there to address them on a religious subject. This man closed his remarks on that occasion by saying, “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; and where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”

That learned and devout man who made that statement was Thomas Campbell. Two years before, he’d left his native Ireland, sailed across the Atlantic on the advice of his physician for his health. His family would follow him shortly after the time he made this statement in 1809.

Mr. Campbell had come to the shores of our fledgling nation as an ordained preacher in the Anti-Burgher Seceder Branch of the Scottish Presbyterian church. (How would you like that handle?) He quickly got his credentials from American Presbyterian officials to preach in Presbyterian churches. But between 1807 and 1809, he had completely studied himself out of the Presbyterian denomination. They had closed their doors—all of their churches—to him, and so he had to speak to whatever small gathering he could find, or his friends could find for him. That’s why he was in Mr. Alter’s farmhouse that night.

Now, Campbell was not the first uninspired man to call attention to the significance of the silence of Scripture, as well as the statement of Scripture. But others before him who had done so had not made the same application of it that Campbell made. Campbell’s statement actually came to be somewhat revolutionary from two standpoints.

In the first place, those who had called attention to Scriptural silence before him had applied the principle only to the abuses of Roman Catholicism. But Campbell’s intent was to apply it across the board—no exceptions—to Protestant denominational creeds and traditions as well.

The second thing that made Campbell’s statement of it revolutionary was the statement of it itself—an easily remembered slogan. “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent.”

Was this just another manmade, sectarian, credo statement of some kind, or did it have its basis in Scripture? We intend to answer that question in the course of our study tonight.

But, there’s a question that precedes that one that needs our attention and our answer first. And so, I want to put it before you now. What did Campbell and others who were attracted by this plea mean by the “SILENCE” part of this statement? I’ve never heard anyone question what is meant by the first part, “Where the Bible speaks, we speak.” But what did he mean when he said, “Where the Bible is silent, we are silent”?

There have been two answers—completely different answers—given to that question. In less than 50 years after Campbell made this statement, many of those who had been attracted by the statement, calling them back to New Testament Christianity, had begun looking around and desiring things in the denominational world that this statement and slogan had helped bring them out of. Two things in particular were on their agenda at that time: The Missionary Society, through which to do the work of evangelizing the world (which, of course, the Lord gave to the church) and then very shortly thereafter, the mechanical instrument of music joined that agenda. To justify the desire to have the instrument and the Missionary Society, these brethren argued that the Bible does not forbid them.

I don’t know if you’ve paid close attention to the controversy that’s been swirling the last two or three weeks on the homosexual “marriage” issue. I think maybe some of you have—it’s gotten pretty close to home here. But, one of the defenses that has been argued by some of those engaging in giving the licenses has been, “The State Constitution does not forbid this.” That’s the very argument these brethren were making in 1850 to introduce the instrument and to employ the Missionary Society to do the work of the church. Well, there is no explicit statement in the New Testament that says, “Thou shalt not employ an instrument in worshipping God; thou shalt not employ a society or other organization outside the church of the Lord to preach the Gospel.”