Looking for Jerry Vines at the CBF

by Russell D. Moore                                                                                  Vol. XV, No. 7, August 2002

FORT WORTH, Texas -It is sad to see a group of Baptists resort to offensive and unloving comments about Muslims at their annual meeting this June. It is also sad to see that nobody noticed.

Before you point me to the heaving pile of columns denouncing Jerry Vines’ SBC Pastor’s Conference remarks about Islam, let me say this – I’m not talking about Jerry Vines. The most offensive “hate speech” against the Muslim people this year had nothing to do with Dr. Vines’ honest assessment of Mohammed. Instead it was the “no comment” statements issued by leaders of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) when asked the most life-or-death question one can ever ask – will Muslims who never come to faith in Jesus Christ be saved or damned?

As you might expect, the hallways of this year’s CBF General Assembly were abuzz about the media furor surrounding the Vines’ sermon – usually agreeing with the liberal Baptist consensus that the remarks were “arrogant” and “stupid.” It was much harder to find someone willing to speak publicly to the heart of Vines’ concern – that, despite all the niceties of American pluralism, Muslims without Christ are going to hell.

Baptist Press correspondent Greg Tomlin posed the question to CBF leaders at the very top echelons of the organization. Some would affirm that Muslim evangelism is absolutely necessary – but only “off the record.” The CBF leadership instead would point to Dan Vestal’s carefully worded statement in response to Vines. The statement expresses a desire for “the highest good for all Muslims and grieve with you over the pain such remarks have caused.” It further assures Muslims of “our respect and our desire for true friendship as well as open, courteous, sincere dialogue.”

But Dan Vestal is strangely silent on a most crucial question – what is the “highest good for all Muslims”? Is it to attend ecumenical dialogue sessions with enlightened liberal Baptists, or is it to find refuge in the salvation found only in Jesus Christ?

The bashing of Islam was relatively common at the CBF General Assembly, but only in terms of Muslim treatment of women, a criticism so politically-correct that even the New York Times editorial page can say “Amen.” Pastor Joy Heaton of North Carolina, for instance, quoted from the Koran on the inferiority of women to men. But, she did so only illustratively to try to tie Southern Baptist conservatives to Islamic misogynists – and she quickly noted that she was not trying to insult “our Muslim brothers and sisters.”

So why is the question of the need for faith in Christ for Muslims an “off the record” hot potato for the CBF leadership? One need only walk the halls of a General Assembly for the answer to that one. At last year’s General Assembly David Key, director of the CBF partner school at Candler School of Theology led a breakout session in which he advocated inclusivism, the idea that one does not need to come to explicit faith in Jesus Christ in order to be saved. At the same meeting another CBF partner dean, Alan Culpepper of McAfee Divinity School at Mercer, led a session with a Jewish rabbi taking issue with the need to evangelize non-Christian Jewish people. This year Wake Forest Divinity School’s Bill Leonard, yet another CBF partner school dean, advocated the inclusivist agenda in his breakout session on a new Baptist theology of evangelism and missions. The ideological activists, especially the leadership of the CBF partner schools, seem more and more committed to a full-orbed inclusivism or pluralism when it comes to the question of what happens to those outside of Christ.

At the same time, the CBF leadership knows it needs to maintain a careful balancing act. They must keep happy the liberal activists who attend the General Assembly and who serve in the leadership of the organization. At the same time, they must keep ignorant the Baptist churches across the South who dutifully send in their tithes because their pastors told them the CBF supports “traditional” missions and evangelism. With this the case, the central question at the heart of the Jerry Vines controversy can never be answered without outraging the activists or waking up the contributor base.

It is easy to scoff at Jerry Vines right now. After all, the whole world scoffs with you. When I think of Jerry Vines and Muslims, however, the Pastor’s Conference speech is not even the first image that comes to mind. Instead, I think of one of my students, who saved and called to preach through the ministry of First Baptist Jacksonville. Nathan spends hours studying the Koran, preparing himself for a witness to Muslims – both here in Louisville and overseas. Rarely does a class go by that Nathan does not walk with me down the hallway talking about how this doctrine or that can be communicated to the lost-especially to Muslims.

I remember Nathan coming to class one day after having shared Christ in the home of an American Muslim who sat listening with a rifle leaning up against the wall of his living room. Nathan’s kind of Great Commission passion – and his love for the lost – was fired up in a congregation that preached and believed that the lost are just that – lost, and in desperate need for the salvation that can only be found in Christ.

If a spiritually searching Muslim has wandered into the SBC Pastor’s Conference this year, I am sure he would have been offended by an honest and forthright appraisal of the prophet he reveres. I am also certain, however, that there would be people there like young Nathan – and his hometown pastor – who would love this man enough to share with him the only gospel that saves.

 I wonder what would have happened had this same Muslim wandered into the CBF General Assembly. He would not have been offended, that’s true enough. If he had the right academic credentials, he might have even been invited to co-lead a “breakout session” on Baptist-Muslim relations. But would he have been confronted with the awful reality of the coming judgment and offered the gospel of Jesus as the Savior of the world?

Perhaps this Muslim might have worked up enough courage to ask his neighbor, “Must I believe in Jesus Christ to be saved?”

 I can only pray that the answer would be something more than, “I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time.”

[Moore serves as Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, and as Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement.]