FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER

by  Dwayne Hastings                                                                                                                                   Vol. IX, No. 1, January 1996

 That siren of the silver screen, Mae West, slips quietly into eternity while asleep in her infamous bed; John Lennon falls in a blast of gunfire in front of his New York City apartment; hundreds of thousands of Americans stay home on Friday night to catch the weekly episode of "Dallas"; and adding to the craziness, those staid denizens of the Bible Belt, Southern Baptists, are locked in a rancorous debate over the nature of Scripture that had come to a vociferous crest just a year earlier.

And in this, the first year of the decade of the 80s, two young professors at Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, TX, release a book quickly recognized by many as the seminal work of the century on historical Baptist views of biblical inspiration and religious authority.

Its title: Baptists and the Bible. Its timeliness: more providential than planned, admits Tom Nettles, who co-authored the book with L. Russ Bush.

Nettles, now department chairman of church history at Trinity Evangelical Seminary, in Deerfield, IL, says the idea for the book started in 1970, shortly after G. Henton Davies was tagged to write the first volume of the Broadman Commentary Series. Southern Baptist conservatives were alarmed about Davies' views on Scripture.

"It was prompting a lot of discussion in seminary classrooms,' notes Nettles, a seminary student at the time. "Some people were saying inerrancy was not the Baptist position - that it was a position manufactured in the 19th century. But I didn't see how it could be anything other than the Baptist position. How could Baptists have survived without believing the Bible was the Word of God and was true in all that it affirmed?"

So, as the Southern Baptist battle for the Bible boiled over, Bush and Nettles were polishing the manuscript of Baptists and the Bible. "We had a contract with Moody Press in 1978 before the Southern Baptist thing ever started. And then, when the book came out in 1980, one year after the famous 1979 Convention, a lot of our colleagues thought we had just jumped on the bandwagon real quick and put something out" Nettles says.

L. Russ Bush, now faculty dean at Southeastern Seminary, in Wake Forest, NC, says he thinks the "book brought a new awareness of the consistency of our Baptist heritage on the issue of biblical authority. I was taught, in college and seminary, that Baptists had never held or taught the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. To discover that Thomas Grantham in the 17th century explicitly taught it, and that in fact most Baptists prior to the 20th century also explicitly taught it, was a surprise to me."

Biblical inerrancy was not a "late-developing doctrine," Nettles repeats. "It was something at the heart of the Baptist witness to Scripture from the earliest days of believers who were called Baptists."

Controversy over the issue was not new to Baptists either, Nettles says: "It was just uncanny as to how many of the issues that were being dealt with in the contemporary controversy had already been discussed in principle in Baptist life. Yet the leading Baptist scholars had always affirmed the complete inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture in its original manuscripts."

It was the Enlightenment and its influence, says Bush, that "misled many people in that they began to see the Bible not as a unique book of divine authority but as a book of religious witness." This led to an ambiguous use of the term, "belief."

A Christian could say he believed the Bible, yet not mean that he accepted its "plain teachings to be true and accurate and binding," says Bush. Belief came to mean that, although the biblical text meant something to the ancient compilers, its "meaning can and should be revised in light of new situations."

"'Belief' is now, for many, an active agent of revision and application rather than a submission to authority," adds Bush, noting this thinking was the root cause of extant theological conflict within the SBC.

Historian Timothy George says Baptists and the Bible was an important book that attempted to counteract the Enlightenment mentality by seeking "to raise the theological and hermeneutical issue of how you can be both scholarly and academic in your engagement with Scripture, using all the techniques and the linguistic tools available, without denying that what the Bible says God says." The bottom line, says George, is: "What the Bible says happened - really happened. Every miracle ... every event in every book of the Old and New Testament is altogether true and trustworthy. That's the historic Baptist view."

And that's what Baptists and the Bible helped articulate at a critical juncture in the Convention's history, agrees theologian Mark DeVine. "I don't know how we could have hoped for the turnaround we have seen and the reengagement of this historic Baptist and Christian zeal for the authority of Scripture without books like Baptists and the Bible;" says DeVine, a professor at Midwestern Seminary, in Kansas City, MO. "I fear we would be further along the road of doctrinal ignorance on the matter."

"Without a firm grounding in the doctrine of the authority of the Bible you are really just swimming in a sea of speculation," adds DeVine. "If the Bible is not the final adjudicator of doctrinal construction, then something else has to be, and whatever that other thing is will lead to compromise on the whole range of theological affirmations that have marked historic orthodox Christianity."

[This and the accompanying articles, "Looking Forward" and "Confessions of Faith," are reprinted from SBC Life, October 1995. Baptists and the Bible is an excellent source. It documents beyond question that Baptists have always believed the Bible to be inerrant. I highly recommend it. TCP]