Southern Baptist Identity

An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future

,

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781433506796
• eBook ISBN: 9781433522871
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

What was once a small, southern, predominantly white denomination has become America's largest evangelical denomination. Yet with the Southern Baptist Convention's growth have come the challenges of increasing fragmentation, theological controversy, and sweeping cultural change. These challenges have caused leaders and members to ask: What does it mean to be a Southern Baptist in the twenty-first century? How can a fresh consensus be established from within? What are the core biblical convictions that must be upheld, the key practices that must be sustained, to reach the lost in this age of cultural accommodation?

These essays by editor David Dockery, Al Mohler, Timothy George, Russell Moore, Paige Patterson, and eleven other SBC leaders address these important issues and themes from several perspectives. Their observations will illuminate the way not only for fellow Southern Baptists but for all evangelicals facing similar challenges in the twenty-first century and beyond.

PART ONE

THEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER ONE

SOUTHERN BAPTIST IDENTITY: IS THERE A FUTURE?

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

ADDRESSING THE FUTURE OF any movement is an inherently dangerous affair. Winston Churchill once remarked to one of his classmates that he was certain that history would treat him well. His schoolmate, a bit incredulous, asked how he could be so certain. Churchill raised an eyebrow and said, “Because I intend to write the history.” That is certainly one way to make sure history looks favorably upon you—provided you have the luxury of writing it yourself. The rest of us, however, are left simply wondering whether the historians of some future age will look back and say we got it even approximately correct. That is a risky business, of course, but it is even more dangerous not to envision the future. The greatest risk is assuming the future will somehow “just happen” in a way that brings glory to God.

As we consider the Baptist movement in the twenty-first century, we can look back on four centuries of Baptist history, Baptist work, and Baptist witness. By no accident, that history also includes four centuries of debate over Baptist identity and the Baptist future.

I have to begin with some word of autobiography. I can remember as a small child explaining to my neighbors that I belonged to the Baptists. That was the terminology—I never knew a time when I did not consider myself a Baptist. Of course, now I know better theologically, but I was a part of the tribe before I ever understood the theology. I was a Baptist by custom before I came to be a Baptist by conviction. That Baptist heritage leads me to feel at home in this discussion. I understand something of the grandeur, something of the vibrant texture of faith that has produced not only the Baptist movement as a whole but the SBC as we know it now.

I was raised by parents who were convictionally Baptists. They were so Baptist, in fact, that when I wanted to become a Boy Scout, my parents would not let me until I was also a Royal Ambassador. This was an extreme position in my view. The Boy Scout troop was sponsored by the same Southern Baptist church as the Royal Ambassadors, so it was essentially the same boys dressing up in different uniforms on different nights. It was a very small world. To me, the external world was a panoply of different faiths—people called “Methodists” and “Presbyterians.” There was a sectarianism there, to be sure, but one that is not to be despised; it was a deeply held sense of belonging. We Baptists knew who we were, and thus we would know whom we should be looking to in the future.

Understanding the present and preparing for the future requires us to consider not only our own autobiographies, but also the biography of a great denomination, the SBC. One of the key issues for our understanding the current situation is to recognize that Baptists have always debated our identity. From the very beginning, there has been a both/and character to the Baptist understanding of what it means to be a Christian. First, Baptists did not intend to start a new faith. The seventeenth-century Baptists were never about the task of creating a new Christian religion. In fact, they went to great lengths to point out that they stood in continuity with the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” Yet at the same time, Baptists were defined by certain unique theological convictions that framed our understanding. Those convictions were of such passionate strength and theological intensity that the early Baptists had to set themselves apart even from other English separatists and nonconformists. Essentially, our Baptist forebears were nonconformists even within the world of nonconformity. So they joined themselves together in congregations of like-minded believers who were uniquely committed to three principles.

The first of those principles was regenerate church membership. If there is any one defining mark of the Baptist, it is the understanding that membership in the church comes by personal profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The church is not merely a voluntary association of those who have been born to Christian parents—even to Baptist parents—or of those who might have been moistened as infants. Rather, the church is an assembly of those who make a public profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and gather together in congregations under the covenant of Christ.

The second principle, a derivative of the first, was believer’s baptism—the conviction that baptism is to be administered only upon an individual’s profession of faith. Baptism is not only a symbol, but an act of obedience and entry into the covenant community of the church. To reject believer’s baptism is therefore to paint a picture of the church that is much distorted.

The third principle was congregational church government. Baptists have made several and various attempts to define exactly what congregational church government should look like. At its root, however, congregationalism affirms that it is the covenanted community that must take responsibility for the ordering of the church, for the preaching of the gospel, and for everything else that God has assigned to the church in this age. There is no sacerdotalism; there is no priestly class, no one who can be hired to do the ministry of the gospel, and no franchise to be granted. The church itself, the covenanted community of baptized believers, must take responsibility for the fulfillment of all Christ has commanded his people.

Much more could be added to Baptist ecclesiology, but these three principles are an irreducible minimum of Baptist identity. When any one of them is compromised—much less denied—then whatever is left may call itself Baptist only by asserting a lie. It is something less than Baptist when any one of these principles is absent.

THEOLOGICAL ISSUES

With these historic principles in mind, we turn to consider some theological issues that now face the SBC and should therefore have our very careful attention. The first of these is the conservative resurgence in the SBC, a movement that emerged most publicly in 1979, even though its roots go back to at least 1963.

The public controversy of 1979 did not emerge out of a vacuum; there was a history behind it. By the 1960s, the Enlightenment had come to Dixie. A region that had long believed itself immune to history suddenly found itself grappling with the very questions that Northern evangelicals had confronted decades earlier and that European Christians had faced in the previous century. Now, Kant, Hume, Locke, and Hobbes arrived at the very threshold of the SBC.

The controversy that erupted in the SBC centered first and foremost on issues of truth and authority. With modernity having already reached our ranks, higher criticism and other ideological denials of the truthfulness of Scripture now presented themselves as challenges. Southern Baptists were thus forced to make a decision whether to assert, affirm, and cherish the Bible as the written Word of God, or merely to receive it as a human testimony of human religious experience.

Yale University professor Gabriel Josipovici once said that we should see the Bible as an arbitrarily collected group of scrolls, writings of tremendous spiritual interest and substance, but which say more about the persons who wrote them than about the God by whom they claim to be inspired. At such a fork in the road, there are only two options: either we will affirm the total truthfulness and verbal inspiration of Scripture, or we will decide that Scripture is to some extent simply a fallible witness to human religious experience. Southern Baptists first faced that choice in the 1960s, but they denied it for a number of years and papered over it for another decade. They tried to find some bureaucratic means of denying the elephant in the middle of the denominational room, but eventually the elephant grew so large it could be contained no longer.

By the 1970s, Southern Baptists had coiled into two separate parties: a truth party and a liberty party. Some tried to join both, but ultimately the controversy forced a choice. The issues became so narrowly focused and so intense in application that individuals eventually had to understand that the candidates running for the office of president of the SBC represented one of these sets of consuming interests.

The truth party understood doctrine to be the most basic issue confronting the convention. They were suspicious that heterodoxy had entered the ranks of Southern Baptists, and they had documentation to back up their claims—reports from students at colleges, universities, and seminaries. Soon, what had begun as a grassroots concern became an organized movement convinced that if the truth was compromised, all would eventually be lost.

The liberty party might best be described with what became a bumper-sticker slogan of the movement: “Baptist means Freedom!” To this party, liberty itself was the leitmotif of the Baptist movement. Now, it is certainly true that members of the liberty party also cherished truth, and members of the truth party had an understanding of Baptist freedom. But for the truth party, freedom had to fit within the truthfulness of God’s Word and the parameters established by divine revelation. For the liberty party, on the other hand, it was truth that had to be accommodated to the more important issue of freedom. Any parameters thus became not only awkward, but eventually impossible. This issue of freedom raises a host of questions, most obviously: “Freedom from what?” and “Freedom for what?” Eventually, the majority of Southern Baptists came to understand that if freedom were the only motif—or even the driving motif—of the denomination, it would finally mean freedom from accountability and freedom from doctrinal responsibility.

From 1963 to 1990, these two parties—truth and liberty—struggled to define the SBC and chart its course into the future. The issues over which they clashed were serious and substantial theological matters. They were not small, they were not minor, and they were not negotiable. Now, it is willful ignorance to suggest that Southern Baptists were not separated by theological differences of tremendous depth and great intensity. Those who say otherwise should simply read the evidence. The inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible were the primary issues of debate, though of course there was always more than that. Questions of epistemology, truth, and authority were only the entryway into an entire complex of debate that included virtually every major doctrinal issue and would ultimately affect the entire shape of the theological task.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Spurgeon understood the Baptist Union in Britain to have slipped into what he called a “downgrade,” antiquarian language that nevertheless accurately communicated the reality of his day. Spurgeon saw the downgrade and gave the warning, but he was not successful in calling the Union to theological accountability. Today, the Baptist Union is a shell of its former self, hardly holding on to its declining membership. Southern Baptist conservative leaders in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, put their lives, their careers, and their ministries on the line to prevent Southern Baptists from following a similar trajectory.

John Shelton Reed of the University of North Carolina (who once held the Margaret Thatcher chair of American studies at the London School of Economics) is one of the greatest historians of the American South. He recently characterized the Southern Baptist controversy as a “pitchfork rebellion.” Southern Baptists heard the issues, became alarmed, and were motivated to action. The true heroes of the conservative resurgence in the SBC were men and women who slept in their cars because they could not afford a hotel room. So motivated were they by the cause of truth and concern for the gospel, they would go wherever they had to go and sleep wherever they had to sleep in order to elect a president who represented the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Southern Baptists in the Twenty-first Century
• Part One: Theological and Historical Perspectives
• Part Two: Ministry and Convention Perspectives
• General Index
• Back Cover