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. In my next piece I will address how the Reformed
hermeneutic has played out among Churches of Christ. Lamar’s
Baconian Method J. S. Lamar (1829-1908 ) wrote the definitive
hermeneutical textbook for the 19th century Stone-Campbell
Movement–The Organon of Scripture (1859). D. R. Dugan also wrote
a signifcant hermeneutics text entitled Hermeneutics: A Text-
Book (2nd ed., 1888 ) which was still used as a hermeneutics
textbook by some when I attended Freed-Hardeman University from
1974-1977. They are bothcut from the same cloth. Both
acknowledge their debt to Baconian inductivism and both
specifically chose it over other potential methods. It