CONFESSIONS OF FAITH: A BAPTIST WAY OF LIFE?

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

While some modern-day academics may deny Baptists area creedal people, in at least one sense, Baptists historically have not hesitated to produce confessional statements to declare their faith.

“It is popular to say that Baptists are not a creedal people, and there is a sense in which that is true,” explains Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, AL. “We don’t have creeds in that we don’t believe the government has any business imposing religious beliefs on people.”

Baptists also are not creedal in placing any confession of faith or belief statement “on an equal footing with the Bible,” George adds. “We don’t elevate creeds to the level of Scripture. Yet we must go on to say ... we have a responsibility to declare our faith openly and clearly for the world to know and to see. This is what Baptists have done throughout our history.”

In their history Baptists have had catechisms for children and numerous published confessions of faith, reports L. Rush Bush, faculty dean at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC.

“Our doctrinal confessions and even documents such as the Church Covenant, that so many Baptist churches adopted and posted on the sanctuary wall in a previous generation, all arise from a belief that Scripture is what it appears to be, a plain document, written by the stated authors, with divine authority,” Bush says.

As long as these confessions of faith truly reflect the teachings of the Bible, George says, “Baptist have a right to set them forth, to declare them openly and publicly, to govern our own congregational and denominational life by them.”

Yet it was the rise of higher criticism that deflected some Baptists from their traditional high view of Scripture, Bush says. No longer was the Bible simply the word of God to these scholars, instead they viewed it as “a complex, edited compilation, often pseudonymous, and based upon the collective wisdom of religious leaders seeking divine truth,” he says.

Freedom to interpret the text eventually was transformed into the freedom to revise the text and to claim it meant something other than it said, Bush notes.

“No one claims to know the correct interpretation of every verse in the Bible, but we do know that when Genesis plainly says that God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac that the text does not mean that Abraham mistakenly thought God had suggested this,” says Bush, pointing out this was not an interpretation of Scripture but instead a revision of the text.

George says Baptists today are suffering from “an erosion of any sense of identity as the people of God.” This is the price a people pay for not clearly delineating their faith and not holding firm to the truth, he reports.

Despite claims to the contrary, George indicates confessions of faith do not intrude upon a believer’s liberty of conscience or soul competency. “No one is going to be forced, or ought to be forced to embrace any confession of faith contrary to their own conscience.”

“Surely in a country that believes in religious liberty and freedom for all people, we want to say people have a civil right, a legal and political right, to be atheistic if they want. Nobody I know in Baptist life is calling that into question,” George says.

“We are already free to be unbelievers,” says Mark DeVine, theology professor at Midwestern Seminary, Kansas City, MO, noting tan unfortunate conflation of soul competency and the priesthood of all believers in this century. “It has come to be thought of as the priesthood of THE believer,” DeVine says, “which is more evidence of the drift to individualism and a religious liberty I don’t think our Baptist forebears would have recognized.”

Early Baptist did not see a contradiction between an anti-creedal stand, which opposed the state forcing a creed on the church, and their use of confessions “as instruments to voluntarily say where we stand as believers ...,” DeVine says.

The priesthood of all believers both speaks of our access to the Father through Jesus Christ by the enabling work of the Holy Spirit and our responsibility to be “faithful purveyors of the Gospel to one another,” he continues. “It does not speak or invite us to a kind of individual autonomous right to believe what we want to.”

DeVine states, “The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers points us to our responsibility to be faithful in our confession; it does not free us to be heretical.”