Book Review: The Church, the Falling Away, and the Restoration
Filed under: Book reviews, Relegion(Christianity) | Tags: Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, church of christ, John Smith, JW Shepherd, restoration movement |
The Church, the Falling Away, and the Restoration by J.W. Shepherd is an excellent overview of the three subjects in the title. That is this book discusses briefly and largely accurately the doctrines of what the Church should be, how the Church fell away afterwards, and then the attempt at restoring the New Testament church, which is a continuous process. Although, Shepherd focuses on the attempts in the late 1790’s to mid 1800’s.
The fascinating part that I find in this book is the last portion. This is because it appears as if numerous people from various denominations(Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian) decided to eventually depart from their various creeds and preach the Gospel pure and simple. They chose to cross the sectarian lines separating the various denominations. There is even one part where two groups operated without knowledge of one another, but for the same purpose. Eventually word got around and they decided to meet one another to see whether they saw eye to eye or not. After some discussion, they decided that they basically did believe the same things and joined together to form what they called “the Church of Christ”. They also cases before this point such as when John “Raccoon” Smith started a small movement and then later joined with Campbell in the Restoration movement.
It’s always good to be reminded of the non-sectarian spirit of the past, lest it die out and be forgotten.
2 comments so far
As far as I know, the book is out of print. I put it on the suggested reading list for our daughter’s homeschooling, since it gives a good overview of church history.
BTW, I wish I was more of a techie to work with Linux, especially on my new pc I just got. (HD went caput.) I like the Open Source concept and love getting away from M$.
It’s true that the original book is out of print. However, you can find the Gospel Advocate’s reprint of the book on Amazon. They also have some other good books on the more recent church history such as Roll, Jordan Roll, and a few others from the Gospel Advocate Classics Series.
On the Linux issue, I would recommend your favorite from the Ubuntu family, or SUSE. You can also dual-boot with Windows XP. You need reinstall Windows first though and assign it a portion of the hardrive. Otherwise, Linux won’t be able to find its master boot record(MBR).
You can also go to distrowatch.com to see what is out there!
Good luck!