Volume 24 Issue 1

I am very pleased that the Stone-Campbell Journal editor and board have chosen to engage efforts to increase racial diversity.1 The year 2020 has awakened many white Christians and institutions to our troubling racial histories that have often excluded people with darker skin tones or from different cultural backgrounds. Like all Christians who value love, justice, and unity, Stone-Campbell institutions have work to do in the areas of telling full and honest stories about our past, repenting of past and current actions that have caused moral injury (whether consciously and purposefully or unconsciously and accidentally), and working for moral repair and shalom in all our relationships and institutions. An important step on this long journey is to create spaces where people from diverse cultural backgrounds can flourish through equity on all levels, including cultural formation, influence, power, and representation. Several hundred years of racialization led directly to our current racialized society and institutions. If we did the work of racializing, we can also do the work of repairing, diversifying, and uniting. But it will be a long and difficult road for us all, requiring decades—perhaps centuries—of thoughtful actions driven by humble, prayerful, inquisitive postures.

When we experience moments of heightened collective awareness about injustices in our society, as we have poignantly felt in the United States since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 ignited a new era of civil rights activism, our scholarly endeavors are one of the tools we can use to explore the challenges we face and the future we desire. We have a tremendous opportunity before us as scholars. We have people with analytical gifts and resources at their disposal to tackle important questions whose answers can lead us into understanding our own time, awareness of ourselves and others, empathy with those different from us. Some of the scholarship we choose to do over the next decade could help the SCJ, could help the various schools connected to the journal, could help Stone-Campbell churches come to grips with biblical, historical, theological, sociological, cultural, pastoral, and educational realities that have informed and should inform our public life together. It is my hope that many of us will use our skills to make the most of our unique opportunity at this moment in time.

In that vein, this issue sheds light on the ways race relations in American history influenced the unity and division experienced among American Christians by engaging a recent book published to honor historian Douglas Foster's academic and ecclesial work. Three scholars review Slavery's Long Shadow: Race and Reconciliation in American Christianity (Eerdmans 2019) and I, as a co-editor of the book, respond to those reviews. Readers will learn not only about the complex racial histories of American and Stone-Campbell Christians, but also about the challenges historians face as we tell these stories.

I encourage readers to take a look at the other articles in this issue. Richard Cherok's article comes from his plenary presentation at this year's SCJ Conference, and it provides an interesting look at Alexander Campbell's thoughts about Christians and politics. Kippy Myers uncovers the tangled history of the old depiction of David Lipscomb as an old woman with a broom named Mrs. Partington. In his article Ryan Eidson explains Alexander Campbell's understanding that Christian college education should not just school a person on one field but should educate the whole person. Joe Hoover implements a common Bible translation methodology to offer a way to remove the apparent contradiction between Jesus' words in Matt 5:17 and Eph 2:15. Finally, Monte French's article explores the gift language of Ephesians.

James L. Gorman Assistant Editor, Stone-Campbell Journal Professor of History, Johnson University Tennessee

Chosen by Stephen Garrett
Cumberland University, Lebanon, TN
SCJ 24.1 Quotables
View Quotables from Other Issues Here

Featured Quote:

"In another essay, Campbell noted that "the best government of this world, (our own,) may be in the hands of a Turk, a Jew, or an Atheist, for aught our Constitution cares."

Richard J. Cherok, "Citizen Campbell: Alexander Campbell and Early American Politics" (SCJ 24.1:7)

"Campbell never naively suggested Christians would rectify all social ills using the ballot, but he preferred the vote to most other activities to bring social change."

Richard J. Cherok, "Citizen Campbell: Alexander Campbell and Early American Politics" (SCJ 24.1:11)

"Unlike other institutions of his time, Campbell's curriculum focused more on the needs of the present and less on the classics."

Ryan Eidson, "More Than Vocational Preparation: Alexander Campbell's Method of Higher Education for Character Formation" (SCJ 24.1:18)

"Campbell did not focus Bethany College on the training of a new class of clergy. His aim was higher and wider than the utilitarian practice of filling pulpits."

Ryan Eidson, "More Than Vocational Preparation: Alexander Campbell's Method of Higher Education for Character Formation" (SCJ 24.1:22)

"As reports were passed from generation to generation, the idea took hold that the caricature was not a written piece, but a cartoon drawing."

Kippy Myers, "The Story of Russell Errett's "Mrs. Partington" Caricature of David Lipscomb" (SCJ 24.1:25)

"Some even claimed to have seen it, although no one has been able to either produce a copy or reference its location."

Kippy Myers, "The Story of Russell Errett's "Mrs. Partington" Caricature of David Lipscomb" (SCJ 24.1:32)

"According to the present translations, the author of Ephesians did not merely "present the logic of his master's position in an unqualified fashion," he contradicted it outright."

Joseph Hoover, "The Reconciliation of Jesus and Paul: A New Translation of Eph 2:15a" (SCJ 24.1:36)

"A complexity of senses for a given lexical item is a normal occurrence in language."

Joseph Hoover, "The Reconciliation of Jesus and Paul: A New Translation of Eph 2:15a" (SCJ 24.1:49)

"Therefore, to say grace has no expectation of response is a notion more at home today than in the first century."

Monte French, "Gift Language in Ephesians" (SCJ 24.1:53)

"Grace is unconditioned, given regardless of the worth of the recipient but is not unconditional, given without any expectation of a response. This expectation is not attached for self-interest or manipulation, but so that the community can be built up."

Monte French, "Gift Language in Ephesians" (SCJ 24.1:63)

"It is a book well worth reading even as—and perhaps because—it sets in relief what it tragically overlooks, that is, the creative and concrete experience of the "racialized other.""

Raymond Carr, Kenneth Gilmore Sr., LaTanya Tyson, "Review Article: Slavery's Long Shadow" (SCJ 24.1:66)

"The book tries to grapple and come to terms with the fact that Jesus Christ transcends all racial barriers, and yet the church on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America when Christians gather to worship."

Raymond Carr, Kenneth Gilmore Sr., LaTanya Tyson, "Review Article: Slavery's Long Shadow" (SCJ 24.1:70)