John Mark Hicks

Before I pursue the application of my “three step hermeneutical method” to some common ecclesiological issues among Churches of Christ, I wanted to take a “time out” and stress the transformative and fuller meaning of “Bible reading.” This post begins a three post series to that end. In my next two posts I will offer […]

Be grateful–this post is under 2500 words. 🙂 I plan one more on Stone-Campbell Hermeneutics and I will move to thinking about a biblical-theologial hermeneutic for contemporary Churches of Christ. The Distinction between Moral and Positive Law The distinction between positive law and moral law in the modern era finds its roots in Thomas Hobbes’ […]

Warning:  this is another “brief” post of over 3000 words.  🙂 In the previous two posts I concentrated on Alexander Campbell–his modern Baconianism as his philosophical-methodological base and his embrace of the Reformed approach to theological hermeneutics. In this piece I want to think more specifically about how Baconianism shaped how Scripture was used in Churches of Christ.  […]

This is a huge subject for a single post. I shall try to be brief. Warning: “brief” ended up being 2800+ words. 🙂 In my first post in this series I noted a few of the modern (Enlightenment) Baconian assumptions of Alexander Campbell’s hermeneutic. In essence Campbell draws out the facts of the redemptive narrative in […]

I begin this series on Stone-Campbell hermeneutics with Alexander Campbell (1788-1866).  While I recognize that Barton W. Stone (1772-1844) and Thomas Campbell (1763-1855) also had a significant impact on how the Stone-Campbell Movement read the Bible, there seems little question that Alexander Campbell was the more dominant figure for Stone-Campbell hermeneutics. Consequently, I will stress Alexander […]

I have upload my published and unpublished materials on Stone-Campbell atonement theology to my Academic page. The unpublished version is a lecture I gave at the 1994 SBL conference in Chicago. It is also available at Hans Rollmann’s Restoration Movement website. I published two articles from that lecture. One appeared in Discipliana 56 (Winter 1996), […]

As an addendum to my series on Calvinism and Arminianism I want to connect this discussion to the conversions of Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell.  Both first approached God through the lens of Calvinist theology and preaching.  Neither could find assurance through that preaching because they were not certain of God’s love for them. […]

I have uploaded some published and unpublished material on the Christology and the Atonement to a couple of my pages. While this is older material–most of which was written in the 1990s–the historical perspective is still, I hope, helpful and some of the theology might be as well. 🙂 On the Academic page….. In 1994 […]

Now available on my Academic Materials page is my presentation at the 2007 Christian Scholar’s Conference in Rochester, MI.  It is entitled Trinity as ‘Necessary’ Fact in Alexander Campbell’s ‘Christian System of Facts’. In this article I argue that the concept of “Trinity” is essential to Campbell’s understanding of Christian theology, and this despite the […]

Now available on my Academic Materials page is the lead article of the then new academic periodical the Stone Campbell Journal entitled “God’s Sensible Pledge: The Witness of the Spirit in the Early Baptismal Theology of Alexander Campbell”. The article suggests that Campbell regarded baptism as God’s sensible (empirical) pledge of assurance. It is an […]