Now, the other answer to that question is that, Thomas Campbell and his even more illustrious and famous son, Alexander, as they began promulgating the Gospel of New Testament Christianity, and as they began continuing to state this motto because it summarizes so well much of the emphasis of the New Testament—as they went out, they were emphasizing that we have no right to act where the Scriptures are silent, that there is no authority to act where God has not spoken. We learn what God desires, not by what He does not say, but by what He DOES say in His Word.

The very reason that the Campbells and others, who were coming with them and emerging from denominational ties and traditions and things that had been in their families for generations, emphasized that we have no right to act where the Scriptures are silent is because of this respect for the silence of Scripture. This is why they gave up infant baptism in favor of immersion of adult believers, not because the Bible said, “Thou shalt not baptize an infant,” because it nowhere says that. But is says that only believers are to be baptized; only those capable of repentance are to be baptized. That, of course, excludes anyone incapable of doing those things, which would, at the same time, include not only infants, but those who are mentally incompetent, unable to grasp the Gospel, and those, as well, who never would believe.

This is why they gave up such things as a hierarchal system of church government in favor of simple, independent, self-governing congregations, as we see in the New Testament, not because the Bible says, “Thou shalt not have a hierarchy,” but because it gives a simple, autonomous, independent, congregational form of government. This is why they gave up the choirs and the instruments of music, not because there was a, “Thou shalt not,” explicitly forbidding them, but because the Lord authorized in His Word the kind of music that He wants. And so it was with a dozen or more other things that could be named, on the very basis of this part of that slogan, “There the Bible is silent, we are silent.”

Now, this is not a difficult thing to comprehend. Perhaps an anecdote that I heard a long time ago will help illustrate it. The scene was in the later 19^th Century in far-eastern Tennessee. It was still horse-and-buggy days back in those areas. And there was a gentleman who was religious, though he was not a Christian, who left on a journey on a Lord’s-day morning, and he’d determined that the first church building that he came to, where they were meeting, he would get out of his buggy, tie up his horse, and go in and worship with them. When he came to one of our little white frame buildings, he tied up his horse—he’d never been into a building that had “Church of Christ” on it before. But he went in and the Bible class was underway. And the first thing that struck him was that he could not see a piano or an organ up at the front of the building anywhere. He’d never been in a church building that did not have one. And he observed in the class that, occasionally some class member would raise a hand, be given [acknowledgment; recognition] to speak, or to ask a question. And so, when he’d been there long enough to feel a little bit comfortable, he dared raise his hand, and he was recognized by the teacher. And he said, “Why ain’t ya’ll got no piano [pronounced “pie-an-o”]? The teacher said, “Who’d like to answer this gentleman?” A brother shot up his hand; he said, “There ain’t no Bible fer it!” And the teacher said, “There you are.” Now, that’s really how simple it is. If there ain’t no Bible fer it, we better not do it; we cannot do it and please God.

I got my driver’s license when I was fourteen years old. It was a hardship case. We lived on a small ranch about five miles out of town, and my Dad could not always find it convenient to run into town for a load of hay or cottonseed cake for the cattle, and sort of thing. So, it was handy to send me into town. So he signed for me to get my license.

I learned to drive in a 37 Ford pickup. It was one of those old pickups—had that oval grill. Some of you fellas will remember them. Had a nice little V-8 engine in it, and it was an old truck, of course, when I was fourteen years old—so don’t start getting any math together there. But I really enjoyed that old truck. I learned how to shift from second to high without using the clutch if I let up on the gas just at the right time. I could just pull it into that fourth for third gear. But you know, I’ve thought many a times, I would like to find one of those old trucks and restore it. And I think it would be a real jewel! But you know, if I did, I couldn’t put an automatic transmission in it. I couldn’t put power steering, power brakes, power doors, power windows—couldn’t put a radio in it, much less a DVD player. I couldn’t put an air conditioner in it. How would I survive in those Texas summers without it now? I did when I was a kid, but I couldn’t now.

When you restore something, you put it back just like it was, don’t you? You can’t add other things to it that weren’t there to begin with, and you can’t leave anything out that was there when it was new. You put it back…just…like…it…was! That’s what this principle is talking about tonight: Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we’re silent. That’s the only way the church of which we read in the New Testament can…be…restored to its pristine and primitive beauty.

Now, while some have tried to interpret Thomas Campbell’s statement, and some are still trying, to justify a liberal attitude toward Scripture, there were those who lived with Campbell and heard him preach and knew his mind and his thinking very well, who wrote otherwise. In 1879, a brother by the name of Nathan J. Mitchell, who was one of those close companions of Campbell, wrote in the American Christian Review, which was the most widely circulated Gospel paper of its time, the following statement about Campbell: “The order of the primitive churches as to the worship of God under the immediate personal teaching and supervision of inspired apostles was equivalent to a command to us moderns, and that the silence of the inspired apostles on anything was to be sacredly and scrupulously regarded as much as the positive teaching.”