A Question of Method: Theology, Authority, and the Limits of Sociological Explanation in The Christian Chronicle’s “A ‘Divine Name’?”

This essay was written by Shawn D. Mathis, PhD, MSc (Oxon), MA, who serves as an elder at the Nashville Church of Christ. His work focuses on theology, hermeneutics, philosophy of language, and questions of scriptural authority within the Restoration heritage

This essay responds to “A ‘Divine Name’?: Is ‘Church of Christ’ a Biblically Mandated Label or an Optional Descriptor?” by Calvin Cockrell, published in The Christian Chronicle (April 24, 2026), and argues that the article rests upon a fundamentally different understanding of how theological questions are to be approached and resolved. The issue is not simply one of interpretation, but of how Scripture itself is approached. This study, therefore, engages the article at the level of principle, arguing that its conclusions sit uneasily within a hermeneutical framework that treats scriptural language as carrying normative theological significance. This critique addresses the reasoning and method of the article as published, and is offered as a theological and interpretive evaluation of its claims.

The matter reaches deeper than the naming of a church. It presses upon the prior question of whether Scripture is, in fact, the inspired and final word by which the church is governed. If Scripture is received as authoritative divine revelation, then its language cannot be treated as merely incidental to the theological claims it conveys. It must be received as authoritative, coherent, and binding. The question, then, is not simply whether one name is preferable to another, but whether Scripture itself remains the church’s final court of appeal.

The argument advanced here is that the Chronicle article repeatedly shifts between two fundamentally different kinds of inquiry: descriptive observations about how religious language functions socially, and normative claims concerning what Scripture authorizes or requires. The result is not merely ambiguity, but a failure to distinguish sociological observation from theological reasoning.

A central difficulty in The Christian Chronicle’s treatment of this question lies not in its inclusion of multiple perspectives, but in its attempt to hold together positions that do not, in fact, hold together. The result is that perspectives grounded in substantially different assumptions are presented alongside one another without sufficient theological adjudication. Apparent contradictions are left in place rather than examined.

The problem is not merely one of scope, but of role. A publication that presents itself as a news source serves its readers best when it reports rather than resolves theological questions; yet in this article, that boundary is not clearly maintained, and interpretive judgments are introduced without the sustained theological grounding such questions require.

The article appears to operate with two aims at once—to inform a broad audience and to maintain its connection with Churches of Christ. But in trying to do both, it blurs important doctrinal distinctions and risks treating them as matters of preference. What is presented as openness or breadth can, at times, leave unresolved the interpretive principles necessary to adjudicate the theological question under discussion.

Given the breadth of its readership, both in the United States and internationally, such ambiguity carries weight. A publication so widely received cannot easily separate the act of reporting from the influence it exerts. And when it enters theological discussion without arriving at clear conclusions, the burden is quietly shifted to the reader. For a largely non-specialist audience, that is no small matter. Questions that require careful theological judgment are left to readers who may not possess the theological framework necessary to evaluate competing interpretive claims. The result is that readers are left to navigate complex theological distinctions with relatively little interpretive guidance.

This is most evident in its handling of issues central to the American Restoration Movement, particularly the authority of Scripture as understood through command, example, and necessary inference, and the long-standing question of the silence of Scripture.

The American Restoration Movement represented a sustained effort—though not always a uniform one—to recover the authority and practice of early Christianity through close engagement with the biblical text. Within influential streams of that movement, Scripture came to be approached through recurring interpretive principles, including command, approved apostolic example, and necessary inference, as means of drawing warranted theological conclusions from the New Testament witness. Historical discussions of Restoration hermeneutics and ecclesial identity may be found in standard works on the American Restoration Movement and the history of Churches of Christ.

Those who today identify with Churches of Christ, and thereby stand within that historical and theological stream, inherit that commitment. To bear the name is to acknowledge the authority of the biblical text—not as a flexible guide shaped by experience, but as the governing standard to which belief and practice are accountable. The question at hand is not sociological, but theological. It concerns not how such language is perceived, but whether the authority of Scripture, as understood within that interpretive framework, is to be maintained.

The question of whether “Church of Christ” is a biblically required name or simply an optional description cannot be settled by sociological observation or by the balancing instincts of journalism. It has to be answered within a clear interpretive framework—one long associated with the American Restoration Movement—which takes Scripture in its full canonical integrity and seeks to read it with care, consistency, and intellectual discipline. Within that framework, the appeal to command, approved apostolic example, and necessary inference (CENI) functions not as a reduction of interpretation, but as one way of drawing warranted conclusions from the text.

When this framework is taken seriously, the central question becomes whether recurring apostolic patterns concerning the identity and description of the church may responsibly be treated as theologically indifferent. The argument advanced here is that they cannot, not merely because they recur, but because of the theological function they serve within the canonical witness.

At the outset, it should be noted that the article proceeds more as journalism than as sustained theological argument. It brings together a range of voices, but offers little guidance in weighing them. What appears as balance can also leave unresolved the interpretive judgments necessary to adjudicate the question under discussion. That approach may serve the purposes of reporting, but it does not suffice in this case. The question before us is not merely descriptive; it concerns what Scripture requires and what binds the church accordingly. In matters of this kind, the task is not simply to present perspectives, but to examine them in light of the text itself and to arrive at warranted conclusions. In the end, the issue is not what people think or experience, but what Scripture, rightly understood and received as authoritative, permits and commands.

Within the range of voices presented in the article, an important distinction needs to be made. Mark Posey gives what is, by comparison, the most theologically grounded position among those cited. His observation that “The church, it belongs to Christ… Therefore it should wear only names that glorify Christ, reflect Scripture and certainly preserve our unity” reflects a core Restoration conviction—one grounded not in human formulations, but in the language and authority of the biblical text itself: namely, that the identity of the church arises from its belonging to Christ as revealed in Scripture.

In this respect, Posey’s reasoning stands in line with the long-standing rejection of humanly invented religious names and the insistence that the church be described in terms consistent with apostolic teaching.

By contrast, several of the other voices in the article are working in a different way altogether. Statements such as “It’s not a title… it’s a relational statement… a declaration of ownership,” or “I just don’t see any evidence… in Scripture that God is concerned… with a specific name on the sign,” tend to shift the discussion away from authority and toward perception, experience, and practical judgment.

In the same way, describing “Church of Christ” as a “brand” or even a “secret handshake” reflects sociological observation more than theological analysis.

This distinction is not incidental; it is fundamental. The article presents these positions together without recognizing that they address different questions. Posey is articulating a claim about what Scripture requires. The others are describing how language is used or understood in practice.

The question posed in the article’s title—whether “Church of Christ” is a biblically mandated label or an optional descriptor—is a theological one. The responses considered here, however, often shift to a different line of inquiry: how the term functions, is perceived, or is received in contemporary settings. That is a legitimate question in its own right, but it is not the question presented. When the two are not clearly distinguished, the result is that a theological problem is approached with sociological answers, and the issue at hand is left unresolved.

The difficulty lies not in presenting multiple perspectives, but in leaving them undifferentiated. Once such perspectives are set alongside one another, the work of distinguishing their categories and of determining which properly governs the question at hand cannot be set aside. Here, that work remains incomplete, and the reader is left without the very distinction the article itself requires. The result is not a resolved theological discussion, but a confusion of categories in which descriptive observations are allowed to stand in place of what is fundamentally a question of authority, thereby obscuring it.

A significant objection must nevertheless be considered. Many interpreters would argue that the New Testament nowhere mandates a single exclusive designation for the church in the modern institutional sense. The apostolic writings employ multiple expressions—“church of God,” “churches of Christ,” “the Way,” “saints,” and others—without presenting one as a universally binding title. From this perspective, Romans 16:16 functions descriptively rather than institutionally: it identifies congregations as belonging to Christ but does not establish a formal ecclesial designation in the later denominational sense.

Such an argument deserves careful consideration because it correctly recognizes the historical distance between first-century Christian communities and modern religious branding. The question, however, is whether the absence of modern institutional naming conventions entails that apostolic language is therefore theologically indifferent. At that point, the governing assumptions determine the outcome.

When we step back and consider the whole of Scripture, the point comes into sharper focus. Throughout the New Testament, the church is consistently described in relation to God and to Christ. Its origin, identity, and authority are bound to that relation. There is no evidence in the text that humanly devised names stand on equal footing with these expressions.

To treat naming as a matter of indifference introduces a principle not derived from Scripture itself, but imposed upon it. It does not sit easily with the consistency of the biblical witness and places interpretive pressure upon the significance of the textual pattern already observed. It also raises the question of how apostolic language is understood to function normatively. Such an approach risks leaving the discussion without sufficiently clear theological moorings.

This point, however, requires clarification, lest it be misunderstood. The argument is not that the earliest Christian communities operated with fixed institutional titles in the modern sense. In the first century, there were no denominational brands, no marketing strategies, no competing ecclesial identities of the kind familiar today. There was one Christ and one movement gathered around him. The various expressions found in the New Testament—“church of God,” “churches of Christ,” “the Way,” “Christians”—do not describe competing entities, but the same reality: communities defined by their allegiance to Christ.

It does not follow, however, that naming is therefore inconsequential or indifferent. That conclusion moves beyond the text rather than arising from it. It confuses the absence of modern institutional labeling with the absence of meaningful designation. The language of the New Testament is not arbitrary; it is relational and theologically charged. To treat it as indifferent is not an act of careful exegesis, but a departure from it.

The deeper question in the present context is not simply whether a particular name may be used. In one sense, multiple scriptural expressions remain available. The deeper question is whether doctrine and practice are aligned with the teaching of the New Testament and the coherence of the canon as a whole. It is here that the historical significance of the American Restoration Movement must be properly understood. Its central claim was not merely to adopt a name, but to recover New Testament Christianity through a disciplined engagement with the text.

As the movement developed, particularly into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, divergences in interpretation became increasingly visible—most notably in the question of the silence of Scripture: whether silence is prohibitive or permissive. As that divide widened, distinctions in doctrine and practice became more pronounced, and with them, distinctions in designation. Within this context, the use of the name “Church of Christ” came to function, especially among more conservative congregations, not as a mere label, but as an expression of a particular commitment to the authority of Scripture and to a specific hermeneutical approach.

In the contemporary religious landscape, therefore, such designations do carry weight. By “designations,” one refers to the names by which congregations are known in public discourse. These designations function within a broader religious environment—an ecosystem in which numerous religious bodies, including denominations, are present and often differentiated by doctrine, history, and interpretive commitments.

This must be stated with care. The churches commonly identified as “Churches of Christ,” arising from the American Restoration Movement, have historically understood themselves not as a denomination in the usual institutional sense, but as an autonomous, congregational expression of New Testament Christianity. That self-understanding is essential and must not be obscured. Yet it does not follow that such churches exist in isolation from the wider religious world. They are recognized, perceived, and often distinguished within that broader context, where names inevitably take on associative meaning.

Within the contemporary religious landscape, designations can function as markers—imperfect, but real—of doctrinal alignment, historical development, and interpretive stance. They signal, however indirectly, a relationship to the theological commitments that shaped their emergence, particularly the nineteenth-century plea of the American Restoration Movement for a return to the authority of Scripture and the recovery of New Testament Christianity.

Yet this historical and sociological reality must not be confused with the primary question raised by the text itself. The biblical witness is clear: the church belongs to Christ and is of God. That theological claim stands prior to, and must govern, any later questions of designation.

What is at issue today is not the legitimacy of a term in isolation, but the relation between language, doctrine, and practice. When that relation is severed, naming is reduced to a matter of preference. When it is maintained, naming retains its theological significance. By recasting the question in sociological terms—of perception, branding, or identity—the article effectively sets aside the very issue it raises. It answers a different question, and in doing so leaves the original one unresolved.

The same point is strengthened by Scottish Common Sense Realism. The broader realist school, represented in part by thinkers such as Thomas Reid, has long maintained that language ordinarily corresponds to real relations rather than functioning as mere arbitrary symbolism.

The phrase “church of Christ,” then, is not merely a label or a convention. It names a real relation: the church belongs to Christ. To treat such language as theologically insignificant, therefore, involves a substantive hermeneutical judgment rather than a merely neutral observation. It risks weakening the connection between words and the realities they are meant to express.

Looking more closely at the language, the New Testament speaks in Romans 16:16 of “all the churches of Christ”: ἀσπάζονται ὑμᾶς αἱ ἐκκλησίαι πᾶσαι τοῦ Χριστοῦ. The relevant expression is αἱ ἐκκλησίαι… τοῦ Χριστοῦ—“the churches… of Christ”—with τοῦ Χριστοῦ functioning as a possessive or relational genitive. It expresses belonging: these assemblies belong to Christ.

This naturally raises the familiar question: should one write “church of Christ” or “Church of Christ”? The Greek text itself does not adjudicate that question. It does not present the later English convention of capitalized institutional naming; it simply names the relation. Capitalization, whether lower or upper case, belongs to English usage, translation practice, and modern stylistic convention.

The question of capitalization—important as it may be in contemporary discussion—remains secondary. It belongs to a later stage of reflection, where issues of designation, identity, and even perception begin to take shape. Such concerns, while not insignificant, are properly distinguished from the primary textual claim. The apostolic language does not present a modern institutional title; it identifies a relation.

That distinction must be maintained. Questions of branding, denominational identity, or public perception arise at a sociological level and must not be confused with the text itself. The primary point remains: the churches are identified by their belonging to Christ. This is not a matter of style, but of meaning. These constructions are not arbitrary labels; they carry theological weight and express the relation they signify.

Conclusion

A careful reading makes clear that the article does not resolve the question it raises; it reframes it in a way that makes resolution difficult from the outset. By placing a normatively grounded claim—what Scripture requires—alongside descriptive or sociological observations, the article shifts the ground of the discussion. The question is not resolved but reframed as the theological issue under consideration becomes increasingly couched in sociological terms.

When the matter is approached through the disciplines brought to bear in this study—Restoration hermeneutics, inductive reasoning, realist philosophy, and the canonical witness of Scripture—the argument points with considerable force toward the conclusion that, while no single English formulation can be shown to be exclusively required, the scriptural designation of the church cannot responsibly be treated as theologically indifferent. This conclusion does not rest on isolated proof-texts, but on the cumulative force of a consistent apostolic pattern read within a canonical and inductive framework. It arises from the cumulative force of the New Testament’s recurring language concerning the identity of the church and the theological significance the canon attaches to that language.

The issue is not simply one of terminology, but of method. The central question is whether apostolic language concerning the identity of the church carries normative theological significance or whether such language may be treated as largely incidental to ecclesial self-description.

The Chronicle article succeeds in presenting a range of contemporary perspectives, but it leaves insufficiently distinguished the difference between sociological observation and theological adjudication. Questions concerning branding, public perception, and religious experience may help explain how language functions within contemporary settings, yet they do not by themselves determine what Scripture authorizes or requires.

The argument advanced here has not been that a single English formulation can be demonstrated as exclusively mandated in all circumstances. Rather, it is that the recurring language of the New Testament concerning the church’s relation to God and Christ carries theological weight and therefore cannot responsibly be regarded as indifferent within a coherent framework of scriptural authority.

At stake, then, is ultimately a hermeneutical question: what kind of reasoning governs the interpretation of apostolic language, and what authority that language is understood to carry within the life of the church.