John Mark Hicks

Is the hermeneutical move from Scripture to application a “Texas Two-Step” or something else? Two or Three? By “Texas Two-Step” I do not mean the country/western dance that moves in sync with 4/4 time.  🙂  I am referring to the basic hermeneutical practice of moving from Scripture to application in “two steps.” Step One:  The […]

On February 2 of this year I conducted a one day seminar at the North Davis Church of Christ in Arlington, Texas. They had invited me to prepare some materials for a congregational-wide study of Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Assembly based on my three books (Come to the Table, Down in the River to […]

It is time for another “Stone-Campbell Web Notes” post. [I actually have no schedule–it is my whim based on what I find interesting. And I am the sole determiner of what is interesting in terms of these Web Notes. 🙂 ] If you are interested in some spirited discussion on traditional issues among Churches of […]

This post begins a new series which will attempt to offer some of the bare outlines of a theological approach to the hermeneutical task. My first series “Created for Hermeneutics” laid some of the theological and philosophical foundations for thinking about hermeneutics. My second series “Stone-Campbell Hermeneutics” provided a historical/theological context for the appreciation and […]

In this last post for this series (link to the first post here) I attempt to offer a balanced–both appreciative and critical–perspective on the hermeneutic that has dominated Churches of Christ for most of their history. It was only in the 1960s that this dominance began to crack as journals like Restoration Quarterly and Mission […]

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’ […]

My first two posts in this series focused on the Baconian and Reformed character of Alexander Campbell’s hermeneutic. My last post described how Churches of Christ have utilized the Baconian method. In this post I describe how Churches of Christ have embraced the Reformed regulative principle and applied it with a Reformed understanding of command, example and […]

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 […]

Kenney Carl Moser (1893-1976) was one of the most significant players in the theological arena of Churches of Christ in the twentieth century. My friend Bobby Valentine has recently demonstrated in a paper delivered at the 2007 Christian Scholar’s Conference at Rochester College (entitled “In with Wallace, Out with Brewer: K. C. Moser in the 1920s”) that K. C. […]

As part of a pre-conference gathering entitled “Theology in the Service of the Church” in conjunction with the 1996 Christian Scholars Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, I presented a paper entitled “The Doctrine of God.”  The presentations at this pre-conference were published in Leaven 8.3 (2000). Some of these themes (providence, pneumatology, etc.) are pursued in my Kingdom […]