Southern Baptists Cannot Assume Agreement on Salvation Doctrine

by Gary Ledbetter                                                                                         Vol. VI, No. 1, January 1994

[Gary Ledbetter is editor of the Indiana Baptist. This article is reprinted from the 27 April 1993 Indiana Baptist.]

As a missionary denomination, Southern Baptists have always seen the doctrine of salvation as foundational not only to our world wide ministry, but to our reason for being. Plans made on all levels are usually filtered through a process that assumes that most people are lost and need salvation through Jesus Christ. It is also assumed in most cases that Southern Baptists must keep this knowledge as a primary focus. Logically, the idea of anyone using the name Christian without accepting what Scripture says about the person and work of Jesus is hard to accept. However, Christian churches have discussed and sometimes divided over just that issue since the beginning of Christian history. Salvation and other doctrinal matters were clarified by the Southern Baptist convention in 1963.

"Salvation involves the redemption of the whole man, and is offered freely to all who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, who by His own blood obtained eternal redemption for the believer. In its broadest sense salvation includes regeneration, sanctification, and glorification." (Introduction, Article IV, Baptist Faith and Message, adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention, May 9, 1963).

This short statement from our Baptist confession of faith is at the heart of our cooperative ministry. The Faith and Message, while not having the force of law or creed, is nonetheless the defining document for many of our SBC agencies. You may have noticed in Baptist Sunday School Board publications that this confession is the doctrinal standard used by writers of all literature produced by the Board. Many denominational employees at all levels are asked to affirm Baptist doctrine as stated in the Baptist Faith and Message as a part of the interview process for employment. Some Southern Baptist churches have built the doctrinal statement in whole or in outline into their constitution and by-laws. It has become an important document to our people. We have assumed that there is great agreement on the article on salvation. We have instead focused on the statements regarding polity or autonomy or biblical authority. While these doctrines have been timely and important to modern Baptists, the statement on salvation has also come out of many years, even centuries, of struggle, dissent, and defense as Baptists have sought to find and maintain orthodoxy in this crucial matter of God's relationship with His fallen creation.

The earliest relevant doctrinal controversies centered around the nature of Christ. The logical dilemma between the full humanity of Christ and his full deity caused some early scholars to downplay one part of Christ's nature at the expense of the other. In the fourth century a man named Arius affirmed that Jesus was a worthy man but not eternal God. In 325, the Council of Nicea rejected this belief. The doctrine of salvation cannot be separated from the person of Christ, and the Arian heresy had far-reaching implications for God's work of redeeming mankind. If Jesus was not God, all other affirmations of the Gospels are to be called into question. The magnitude of God's sacrifice is also diminished in the minds of those who accept the compromise of Arius. Further, if Jesus was only the admirable son of Joseph and Mary, he was born with the same sin nature as his father. Other heresies regarding the person of Christ arose during the early years of church history. Typically, these divergent theologies attempted to make the mystery of Jesus' nature more acceptable to human intellect. Later, councils also rejected these innovative christologies along with the dire effects they had on the mission of the church.

The most noteworthy and hard-fought disagreement on the work of Christ arose during the 16th century. The Roman church had attached non-biblical baggage to the means of redemption and then placed scriptural authority on a lower level so that human standards might prevail in the argument. Men who began to read the Bible for themselves discovered salvation by grace, in effect declaring war on the religious status quo. Martin Luther was a German monk who experienced great personal turmoil in his faith until he began to read the New Testament for himself. He found in the idea of salvation by God's grace the comfort that had eluded him in the teaching of the church. Soon, Luther was at odds with the church as he found more and more in the practice of religion that did not measure up to biblical standards. He soon broke with Catholicism, married a former nun, and started the protestant reformation of Christianity. He also started a war and called down a death sentence on himself by the doctrine he espoused.

Later that century saw great reformers such as Zwingli, Calvin, and the Anabaptists ("those who baptize again," the Anabaptists rejected the practice of infant baptism and taught the baptism only of those who accept Christ). Salvation by grace, the sovereignty of God, and the meaning of believer's baptism were rediscovered as men read the Scriptures as authoritative and instructive for the believer's faith and practice. Each group in their own way and with a different emphasis hastened a return to the first century understanding of redemption and salvation through Jesus Christ. It was also this century of reform that spawned the ancestors of the modern Baptist tradition.

Generally, Baptists have, since the Reformation, continued to emphasize the ideas that made reformation possible – the priest hood of believers, the authority of the Bible, and a simple gospel based on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Interests and issues only indirectly related to these matters have also been a part of our history, as they were a part of our beginnings in America. It was the simple gospel, however, separated from ecclesiastical trappings and even from the emphasis on professional clergy that kept Baptists on the sharp end of American growth and expansion. Laymen were taught that they too were ministers of the Good News. In fact most Baptist preachers came from the same working class families that made up our churches. Social and class barriers did not free our people from a sense of ownership of the gospel ministry. Baptists are not the only group that shared these characteristics or even this success, but our commitment to biblical priorities has allowed us to maintain growth and focus in a way that many groups have not.

It was also the Baptist commitment to the biblical doctrine of salvation that caused us to begin a world mission enterprise. Although much world exploration was done with at least some missionary intent, these projects depended on governmental support and upon the blessing of a state church. In the latter part of the 18th century, an English Baptist minister named William Carey began to wonder if God also meant for the Gospel to be carried to those people who had not yet heard it. Carey's enthusiasm was not met with great affirmation by his Calvinist brethren and his mission struggled for support. He had, however, begun something among independents (those without state support or sanction) that would soon affect every corner of the globe. Southern Baptists now oversee the greatest, best funded, and most effective mission organization in the world. Our reasoning is much like that of William Carey and is born of the same doctrinal base.

Throughout the entire period of the Christian church, the vitality and growth of our churches and people have depended on our commitment to a biblical concept of salvation. As I indicated earlier, that statement is a little like saying that a farmer's success has something to do with farming. In the 20th century, however, evangelical Christians have begun to debate not only the means of salvation and the methods of evangelism, but also the need for it. The effects of 19th century philosophy have led many modern biblical scholars to question first the details of Scripture and then, inevitably its meaning. Baptists have not been the only group affected by this theological apostasy, but, to our surprise, neither have we been immune to the blight.

In the last twenty or thirty years, we have maintained that our people "generally agree" on the meaning and means of salvation. We have held this viewpoint without examining its veracity. It is also of questionable significance what our people generally believe if our pastors and those who train them do not plainly affirm and practice doctrinal integrity. This integrity has been challenged more often than has been commonly admitted. These events and examples may be familiar, but the weight of them calls attention to the fact that Southern Baptists should not take for granted even the most basic doctrine. If we do not know our faith intimately and contend for it vigorously, we will eventually find ourselves on the wrong end of the next reformation.

Temp Sparkman was a professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary up until last Spring when he retired. Concerns arose about his view of salvation as early as 1972 when he wrote a book for the Baptist Sunday School Board called Being a Disciple. Some of the statements in that book were vague but raised reasonable doubts about his personal and professional view of redemption. The following quote is reportedly typical of his statements in the now out-of-print Being a Disciple and other books that touched on the doctrine of salvation, "What we do see clearly in the Genesis story is the effect of sin. Sin obscures our true sonship with the Father." "Man was so sinful that he could not see that he was a son of God...." "You and I are sons by free gift. That sonship has been obscured by sin. The work of Jesus was to show us who we really are, with the obscurity peeled back." Trustees dealt with charges against Sparkman up until 1986 when they cleared him of heresy charges because of what some saw as universalist doctrine, the belief that all people will be saved regardless of their faith or lack of it.

In 1986, Southern Baptist Seminary professor Molly Marshall moved the focus of the Baptist debate regarding salvation to Southern Seminary with her doctoral dissertation. In one section Marshall seemed to suggest a second chance at salvation after death. "...those who do not know (Christ) have the inevitable opportunity for clarification of, or confrontation with Him who has been the unknown object of their faith." Elsewhere she opens the door to other world religions. "God's seeking grace is expressed universally and thus one does not approach a Muslim or Hindu as one already condemned before God, but as one in whose context of faith the creative-redemptive eternal Logos of God is drawing persons toward explicit faith in Jesus Christ as Lord." These quotes have been discussed by trustees in the past, seemingly to their satisfaction. It does, however, point out at least that salvation is at least as controversial in recent days as it was 470 years ago. Dr. Marshall most recently contributed an article to the Winter 1992 Southwestern (as in Southwestern Baptist Seminary) Journal of Theology, an article that redefines the whole reason and means of repentance as it relates to redemption. She says in her article: "The ‘journeys of conversion' must retrace the pathways particular to discreet expressions for sin: for men it is the sin of pride and exploitation of others, and for women it is the sin of self-abnegation and willing complicity in their oppression."

That same issue of the Southwestern Journal included an article by Henry Smith, an untenured instructor in the missions department which called into question the need for special revelation of the person and means of salvation. For example: "Reading the Bible through the eyes of pessimism yields the conviction that most people are destined for hell because they have not heard about and believed in Christ in their lifetimes." It has been reported that Smith will not be returning to Southwestern this fall. [He did not.]

Glenn Hinson, who resigned as Church History professor for Southern Seminary last year, also expressed doubts about what he viewed as the "exclusive" nature of Christianity. In his Evangelization of the Roman Empire, Hinson suggests that "...Christianity might see its mission not so much in competition with other world religions as in cooperation or in conjunction with them." Clearly this is not the view that reformed Christianity or launched the modern missionary movement.

These examples should serve to illustrate that we should not assume agreement about even the most basic tenets of Christianity. The early church had to deal often with christological heresies partly because they lacked an objective standard that defined orthodox belief. The bringing together of biblical documents into a fixed canon helped with this problem. Later, the Roman church elevated various human authorities and legends above Scripture and fell into grave error regarding salvation and other doctrines. The protestant reformation was largely a return to biblical authority and practice. It should be no surprise to us that 20th century theological problems began with doubts about small, everyday miracles in the Gospel accounts. Interspersed throughout the well known Baptist examples of modernist doctrine is the assumption that the Bible doesn't say what it seems to plainly say. There is no little way for us to back away from scriptural authority. There is a gradual way perhaps but not an insignificant way. It is usually a safe bet that when someone "has questions" about some little thing in the Bible that this doubt will eventually surface in many and unexpected places.

Baptists have been surprised to see the theological debate progress from Evolution vs Creation, to the authorship of various books in the Bible, to whether or not Jesus walked on water, to whether or not He really rose from the dead, to whether or not any of this matters in the least. All of this debate was in the name of Christ and much of it was done on our time. We shouldn't have been so surprised. The only difference between little errors and big ones is time.