A
Alexander Campbell — the debater who built a movement and refused a name.
An Ulster-born printer, farmer, college founder and formidable public debater who edited the Christian Baptist and then the Millennial Harbinger for forty years. He argued in public against the atheist Robert Owen in 1829 and against a Catholic bishop in 1837, and spent his life insisting the movement not be called after him.
Meet them — context →
The shared center — held across the tradition
Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where they are silent, we are silent.
Thomas Campbell's rule of 1809 was meant to end division by removing everything not in the text — creeds, titles, denominational names. It produced instead the movement's permanent argument, because two people can read the same silence in opposite ways.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Held by most — broad, but not universal
Baptism is immersion, of a believer, for the forgiveness of sins.
Not a symbol of a forgiveness already received but the point at which it is received, from Acts 2:38. This is the doctrine that separates the Churches of Christ most sharply from evangelical Protestantism, and it is why the movement has historically not counted the unimmersed as Christians — a position many members now hold more loosely than their grandparents did.
Go deeper — context →
Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
A New Testament pattern that can be read off the text and reproduced, so that division becomes unnecessary
After death
Resurrection and judgment; the movement has argued about hell and about the millennium without ever making either a test