Contesting Catholicity

Theology for Other Baptists

Curtis W. Freeman

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781481300285, 9781481300278
• eBook ISBN: 9781481303156
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Baptists originated as a protest movement within the church but have developed over time into a distinct sect, one committed to preserving its place in the hierarchy of denominations. In today's postmodern, disestablished context, Baptists are in danger of becoming either a religious affinity group, a collection of individuals who share experiences and commitments to a set of principles, or a countercultural sect that retreats to early Enlightenment propositions for consolation and support.

In Contesting Catholicity, Curtis W. Freeman offers an alternative Baptist identity, an "Other" kind of Baptist, one that stands between the liberal and fundamentalist options. By discerning an elegant analogy among some late modern Baptist preachers, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baptist founders, and early patristic theologians, Freeman narrates the Baptist story as a community that grapples with the convictions of the church catholic.

Deep analogical conversation across the centuries enables Freeman to gain new leverage on all of the supposedly distinctive Baptist theological identifiers. From believer's baptism, the sacraments, and soul competency, to the Trinity, the priesthood of every believer, and local church autonomy, Freeman's historical reconstruction demonstrates that Baptists did and should understand themselves as a spiritual movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

A "catholic Baptist" is fully participant in the historic church and at the very same time is fully Baptist. This radical Baptist catholicity is more than a quantitative sense of historical and ecumenical communion with the wider church. This Other Baptist identity envisions a qualitative catholicity that is centered on the confession of faith in Jesus Christ and historic Trinitarian orthodoxy enacted in the worship of the church in and through word and sacrament.

PART I

SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

1

Alterity and Its Cure

Other Baptists are sick, and they know it. This sickness is terminal, and it is shared by others. But there is good news; there is a cure. Other Baptists find the cure for their alterity by participating in the life of the triune God with the communion of the saints in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.¹ At one time the social location of Baptists on the theological landscape was unambiguous. Now there are Other Baptists—marginalized and no longer at home, even among their own people and sometimes in the churches of which they have been members all their lives. The empire under whose aegis these Baptists once comfortably lived was conquered, and the culture they once inhabited has been replaced.

Finding a way to account for this Baptist otherness without simply becoming the negative image of “the powers that be” proves more problematic than one might suspect. The rhetoric employed by Baptists engaged in the struggle to be Baptists required an Other and indeed is unintelligible apart from it.² The residual discourse of controversy illustrates why the protest of exiled Baptists continues to reflect the dominant order that displaced the old one, and it indicates why it is so difficult to find a way to speak in a language that does not assume the terms of the opposition. Such politics are based not in an account of radical otherness, which is a matter of absolute difference, but rather on a notion of proximate otherness, which involves differentiation from one’s near neighbors who share an anthropological similitude. While exotic otherness can be tolerated, the real challenge proves to be the near Other.³ It is tempting to follow this social and political version of otherness, but what is needed is an account of alterity in which otherness is not simply the mirror image of the regnant ideology but something radically other—oriented toward a new end, toward God. Only from such a standpoint of radical otherness can there be the leverage to subvert the structures of representation and domination.⁴

A sustaining alterity neither collapses into an integralism in which an infinite oneness coercively overcomes otherness nor dissolves into the pluralistic fetishization of difference in which otherness is relentlessly celebrated.⁵ Edward Said described this kind of otherness in his ground-breaking work, Orientalism, in which he explained why the alterity of the Orient was such that its moral landscape could not be interpreted by offering a panoramic vision of global geography. He suggested instead that the Other can be understood only by a narrative display that permits space for the diversity of human experience.⁶ This work offered the vision of a nourishing otherness without collapsing into integralism or dissolving into pluralism.

To move forward Other Baptists must similarly navigate beyond conservatism and liberalism with the hope that the markers of otherness will become visible. The journey must also be situated within the ongoing story of dissenting voices in the tradition of the whole church so that it becomes clear that this story is one of contesting catholicity.⁷ Retrieving these voices of alterity within the tradition of the church catholic is crucial for providing an alternative story to the conquest narrative that has become synonymous with Christendom.⁸

Perhaps an awareness of radical otherness might become an occasion for a kairotic moment like that of Michael Harrington, whose discovery of a hidden poverty that lay beneath the dark underside of an affluent society enabled him to tell the untold story of the invisible poor. His vision captured the imagination of a new generation who began to see beyond the “Other America” to the Great Society.⁹ The reception of Harrington’s book was a happy surprise as it became the manifesto for the War on Poverty. But unlike Harrington, who left the church in search of “the real world” of politics, Other Baptists are looking for radical transformation of the world through the church and the gospel it proclaims.

Other Baptists no doubt are looking for ways to recognize other Other Baptists on this same journey. The surprising signs of Baptist alterity may include frustration with both lukewarm liberalism and hyperfundamentalism; a desire to confess the faith once delivered to the saints, not as a matter of coercion, but as a simple acknowledgment of where they stand and what they believe; a recognition of the Trinity as the center of the life to which they are drawn; a longing to be priests to others in a culture of self-reliance; a hope of sharing a life together that is not merely based on a common culture or determined by shared interests; a commitment to follow the teachings of the Bible that they understand and being open to receive more light and truth that they do not yet understand; trusting God’s promise of presence in water and table; a yearning for the fulfillment of the Lord’s Prayer that the church may be one. Other Baptists desire to claim the promise given by the Apostle Paul that “all things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3:21-23). This is how Other Baptists recognize one another on the journey.

Memoir of a Dixieland Postliberal

Other Baptists are not unaware of their otherness. Many of them discovered it through controversy and contestation. In 1988, at an annual gathering of Baptists in San Antonio, Texas, longtime gadfly W. A. Criswell decried the way liberals attempted to co-opt the language of conservatism. To a cheering audience of pastors, Criswell began his address: “Because of the opprobrious epithet ‘liberal,’ today they call themselves ‘moderates.’ ” But, he continued, “a skunk by any other name still stinks!”¹⁰ The jeremiad went on to lament:

To my great sorrow, and yours, we have lost our nation to the liberal, and the secularist, and the humanist, which finally means the atheist and the infidel. America used to be known as a Christian nation. It is no longer. America is a secular nation.¹¹

America was suffering from “the curse of liberalism,” which, he contended, led to the loss of its status as Christian nation that Baptists had founded and that Baptists deserved to reclaim.¹² Liberalism was to blame for leading American public schools, church-related universities, and denominational seminaries down the slippery slope of secularization. The solution was simple: the curse must be broken by taking the Baptists and America back to their conservative Christian roots. To rid the Baptists of liberalism once and for all, it was imperative to have a real conservative as the convention president and continue to purge all denominational institutions of so-called moderates. He succeeded.¹³

Criswell’s sermon wove a slender thread of history into the fabric of a myth. John Smyth, the first Baptist, did indeed emerge out of the same congregation of English Christians “who came on the Mayflower,” but the Pilgrim Church was not Baptist, nor can the establishing of the Plymouth colony be mistaken as the founding of America.¹⁴ Even if this revisionist history about America’s “Baptist” origins were true, it is unclear how the influence of a liberal ideology held by so few could have such enormous consequences on education, society, and the church.¹⁵ Though it was an effective political speech—and this particular preacher was a master of the craft—the message was not resonant, nor was his argument persuasive. Liberalism, rather than a curse, was a blessing to many. Progressive views on the Bible, science, race, gender, and peace were much more attractive than the retrogressive alternatives held by conservatives. And, as it turned out, these so-called liberals were not the scary figures that they were made out to be. They were models of Christian character and theological sophistication. Yet, for many, a liberal education took place largely outside the curriculum.¹⁶

Many struggling young Baptists found that the story of Clayton Sullivan mirrored their own intellectual journey.¹⁷ They identified with the author’s struggle to come to terms with being a liberal among conserva-tives when he said:

I was bewildered. I felt I didn’t have a friend anywhere. I found myself questioning whether I should have studied to be a preacher. My dream was becoming a question mark. Was it all a mistake? Maybe God had not spoken to me in the kitchen of the Heidelberg Hotel. Maybe I’d been fooled or maybe I’d played a trick on myself. Yet these feelings I suppressed. Instead, I reasoned, “It’s too late to turn back now. I’ve invested eight years beyond college studying to be a preacher. Turning around wouldn’t make sense.”¹⁸

They learned to make an uneasy peace with muddling through long after the certainties of faith disappeared, but, unlike Clayton Sullivan, none of their professors likely ever declared, “I’ve read your dissertation, and I have to tell you that I don’t think you have a moral right to be a Southern Baptist preacher.”¹⁹

But abandoning the faith was not the only option. There were Dixieland liberals who struggled to adapt the faith to the modern world. They were a rare species of Baptists, and they were hard to identify because many of them had become adept at blending into the landscape of the surrounding culture. To survive in the ministry, they learned the artful dodge of knowing the balance between lifting a prophetic voice for social justice and lending a priestly ear to struggling souls.²⁰ “Paying the rent,” they sometimes called it. Although conservatives like Criswell continued to raise the specter of growing liberalism, the subversive subculture of progressives remained fairly small, although their influence often exceeded their numbers.²¹

The vanguard of dissenters was led by Carlyle Marney, whose iconoclastic style and indomitable spirit epitomized Dixieland liberalism.²² For Marney, fundamentalism was “the heresy of the South.” He was sharply critical of conservatives like Criswell who retreated into a retrograde religion underwritten by the repressive powers of race, wealth, and militarism. While serving as pastor of prominent churches in Texas and North Carolina, Marney frequently lectured in the university divinity schools at Chicago and Harvard. He served on the editorial boards of the Christian Century and Theology Today, and he was an ecumenical leader in the National and World Council of Churches (WCC). In the last decade of his life, Marney held a teaching appointment at Duke Divinity School, which at the time was identified as a hub for progressive Christianity in the South.²³

Marney liked to think of himself as a pilgrim on a journey, and his writings were like theological travel narratives mapping the way for fellow strugglers. He embraced a conviction retrieved from his seventeenth-century forebears, declaring his commitment to “follow new light into any place as soon as I knew it to be new light.”²⁴ Following further light glimmering on the horizon of the new creation required gumption, of which Marney had plenty. Yet even his liberal supporters expressed puzzlement over the theological direction to which he gestured in the preface to his 1970 book, The Coming Faith:

I plead also for a renunciation of that fundamental heresy that Jesus is God. This keeps millions from loyalty to our banners. To call Jesus God is an impertinence against Christ and God. For the Son is not the Father. He is Son, and man-son at that. And I long for the Jewish hope to be rediscovered. That hope that knew about a Father. How new this would be! If not spoiled by a frightened, clinging, hearthsick fundamentalism.²⁵

But fundamentalism was not the only darkness that threatened to engulf the faith. There was also the growing force of secularity. Marney attempted to envision a way beyond both alte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Church, Sect, or Self?
• Part I SICKNESS UNTO DEATH
• Part II LIFE THAT REALLY IS LIFE
• Conclusion Recovering Baptists and the Coveted Future
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index