James Dunn on CBF & SBC

                                                                                                                                                                     Vol. IX, No. 2, February 1996

This issue’s “Anti-Heritage” is an excerpt from an address given by James M. Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, to the moderate-liberal Whitsitt Heritage Society on 5 May 1994.

 “If we keep alive the Baptist vision of religious freedom, ...we will give through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and peddle Baptists Today and recommend Smyth and Helwys, both curriculum materials and books.

“We will stick with the Baptist Joint Committee and say good words for the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond and Truett Seminary and other expressions of theological education with integrity. ...

“I am not suggesting that the Southern Baptist Convention as such can ever be recaptured.

“It is over.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

 Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

 All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

 Cannot put Humpty together again.”

[Editorial Comment: A little explanation for those readers who may not be familiar with all Dunn’s references. The “Cooperative Baptist Fellowship” is the stealth denomination established by moderate-liberals when they realized that grassroots Southern Baptists were serious about returning the Convention to the full authority of God’s Word, and that the moderate-liberals could no longer continue to lead the SBC down the slippery slope to liberalism. Baptists Today is the liberal newspaper they set up. Smyth and Helwys is their competitor to the SBC Sunday School Board. S & H publishes Sunday School curricula and books written from their perspective. The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs is Dunn’s lobbying organization in Washington which seeks more to protect the government from the church than vice versa. The Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond is a very liberal school established to compete with the six SBC supported seminaries. Truett Seminary is another moderate-liberal seminary set up at Baylor University in Texas for the same purpose. If your church gives through the WM2 budget plan of the Baptist General Association of Virginia you are helping fund the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond and the Baptist Joint Committee as well as several other liberal organizations (see p. 42 of the 1994 Virginia Baptist Annual)].