Standing Firm
A strong faith strongly held
by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. Vol. XIX, No. 8, October 2006
As we consider the Baptist movement in the 21st century, we can look back on more than four centuries of Baptist history, Baptist work, and Baptist witness. By no accident, that also includes four centuries of debate over Baptist identity and the Baptist future.
I should begin with a word of autobiography. I remember as a small child explaining to my neighbors that I belonged to the Baptists. That was the terminology – I never knew a time when I did not consider myself a Baptist. Of course, now I know better theologically, but I was part of the tribe before I ever understood the theology. I was a Baptist by custom before I became a Baptist by conviction. That Baptist heritage leads me to feel at home in this discussion. I understand something of the grandeur, something of the vibrant texture of faith that is produced not only by the Baptist movement as a whole, but also by the Southern Baptist Convention as we know it.
I was raised by parents who were convictional Baptists. They were so Baptist, in fact, that when I wanted to become a Boy Scout, my parents would not allow it until I was also a Royal Ambassador. This was an extreme position in my view. The Boy Scout troop was sponsored by the same Southern Baptist church as the Royal Ambassadors, so it was essentially the same boys dressing up in different uniforms on different nights. It was a very small world. To me, the external world was a panoply of different faiths – people called Methodists and Presbyterians. There was a sectarianism there, to be sure, but one that is not to be despised. It was a deeply held sense of belonging. We Baptists knew who we were, and thus we knew who we should be in the future.
Understanding the present and preparing for the future requires us to consider not only our own autobiographies, but also the biography of our great denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. One of the keys for understanding the current situation is to recognize that Baptists have always debated our identity.
From the very beginning, there has been a both/and character to the Baptist understanding of what it means to be a Christian. First, Baptists did not intend to start a new faith. The 17th century Baptists were never about the task of creating a new Christian religion. In fact, they went to great lengths to point out that they stood in continuity with the faith "once for all delivered to the saints." Yet at the same time, Baptists were defined by certain unique theological convictions that framed their understanding. Those convictions were of such passionate strength and theological intensity that the early Baptists had to set themselves apart even from other English separatists and non-conformists. Essentially, our Baptist forebears were non-conformists even within the world of non-conformity. So they joined themselves together in congregations of like-minded believers who were uniquely committed to three essential principles.
The first of those principles was regenerate church membership. If there is any one defining mark of Baptists, it is the understanding that membership in the church comes by a personal profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The church is not merely a voluntary association of those who have been born to Christian parents – even Baptist parents – or of those who might have been moistened as infants. Rather, the church is an assembly of those who make a public profession of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and who then gather together in congregations under the covenant of Christ.
The second principle, a derivative of the first, was believer's baptism, the conviction that baptism is to be administered only upon an individual's profession of faith. Baptism is not only a symbol, but an act of obedience and entry into the covenant community of the church. To compromise believer's baptism is therefore to paint a picture of the church that is much distorted.
The third principle was congregational church government. Baptists have made several and various attempts to define exactly what congregational church government should look like. At its root, however, congregationalism affirms that it is the covenanted community that must take responsibility for the ordering of the church, for the preaching of the Gospel, and for everything else God has assigned to the church in this age. There is no sacerdotalism, no priestly class, no one who can be hired to do the ministry of the Gospel and no franchise to be granted. The church itself, the covenanted community of baptized believers, must take responsibility for the fulfillment of all Christ has commanded His people.
Much more could be added to Baptist ecclesiology, but these three principles are an irreducible minimum of Baptist identity. When anyone of them is compromised – much less denied – then whatever is left may call itself Baptist only by asserting a lie. It is something less than Baptist when anyone of these principles is absent.
Theological issues
With these historic principles in mind, we turn to consider some theological issues that now face the Southern Baptist Convention and should therefore have our very careful attention. The first of these is the conservative resurgence in the SBC, a movement that emerged most publicly in 1979, even though its roots go back to at least 1963.
The public controversy of 1979 did not emerge out of a vacuum; there was a history behind it. By the 1960s, the Enlightenment had come to Dixie. A region that had long believed itself immune to history suddenly found itself grappling with the very questions that Northern evangelicals had confronted decades earlier and that European Christians had faced in the previous century. Now, Kant, Hume, Locke, and Hobbes arrived at the very threshold of the SBC.
The controversy that erupted in the SBC centered first and foremost on issues of truth and authority. With modernity having already reached our ranks, higher criticism and other ideological denials of the truthfulness of Scripture now presented themselves as challenges. Southern Baptists were thus forced to make a decision whether to assert, affirm, and cherish the Bible as the Word of God written, or merely to receive it as a human testimony of human religious experience.
Yale University professor Gabriel Josipovici once said that we should see the Bible as an arbitrarily collected group of scrolls, writings of tremendous spiritual interest and substance, but which say more about the persons who wrote them than about the God by Whom they claim to be inspired. At such a fork in the road, there are only two options: Either we will affirm the total truthfulness and verbal inspiration of Scripture, or we will decide that Scripture is to some extent simply a fallible witness to human religious experience. Southern Baptists first faced that choice in the 1960s, but they denied it for a number of years and papered over it for another decade. They tried to find some bureaucratic means of denying the elephant in the middle of the denominational room, but eventually the elephant grew so large it could be contained no longer.
By the 1970s, Southern Baptists had coiled into two separate parties: a truth party and a liberty party. Some tried to join both, but ultimately the controversy forced a choice. The issues became so narrowly focused and so intense in application that individuals eventually had to understand that the candidates running for the office of president of the SBC represented one of these sets of consuming interests.
The truth party understood doctrine to be the most basic issue confronting the convention. They were suspicious that heterodoxy had entered the ranks of Southern Baptists, and they had documentation to back up their claims – reports from students at colleges, universities, and seminaries. Soon, what had begun as a grassroots concern became an organized movement convinced that if the truth was compromised, all would eventually be lost.
The liberty party might best be described with what became a bumper-sticker slogan of the movement: "Baptist means freedom!" To this party, liberty itself was the prevailing motif of the Baptist movement. Now, it is certainly true that members of the liberty party also cherished truth, and members of the truth party had an understanding of Baptist freedom. But for the truth party, freedom had to fit within the truthfulness of God's Word and the parameters established by divine revelation. For the liberty party, on the other hand, it was truth that had to be accommodated to the more important issue of freedom. Any parameters thus became not only awkward, but eventually impossible. This issue of freedom raises a host of questions, most obviously: "Freedom from what?" and "Freedom for what?" Eventually, the majority of Southern Baptists came to understand that if freedom were the only motif – or even the driving motif – of the denomination, it would finally mean freedom from accountability and freedom from doctrinal responsibility.
From 1963 to 1990, these two parties – truth and liberty – struggled to define the SBC and chart its course into the future. The issues over which they clashed were serious and substantial theological matters. They were not small, they were not minor, and they were not negotiable. Now, in the year 2005, it is willful ignorance to suggest that Southern Baptists were not separated by theological differences of tremendous depth and great intensity. Those who say otherwise should simply read the evidence. The inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible were the primary issues of debate, though of course there was always more than that. Questions of epistemology, truth, and authority were only the entryway into an entire complex of debate that included virtually every major doctrinal issue and would ultimately affect the entire shape of the theological task.
At the end of the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon understood the Baptist Union in Britain to have slipped into what he called a "downgrade," antiquarian language that nevertheless accurately communicated the reality of his day. Spurgeon saw the downgrade and gave the warning, but he was not successful in calling the Union to theological accountability. Today, the Baptist Union is a shell of its former self, hardly holding on to its declining membership. Southern Baptist conservative leaders in the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, put their lives, their careers, and their ministries on the line to prevent Southern Baptists from following a similar trajectory.
John Shelton Reed of the University of North Carolina (and who once held the Margaret Thatcher chair of American studies at the London School of Economics) is one of the greatest historians of the American South. He recently characterized the Southern Baptist controversy as a "pitchfork rebellion." Southern Baptists heard the issues, became alarmed and were motivated to action. The true heroes of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention were men and women who slept in their cars because they could not afford a hotel room. So motivated were they by the cause of truth and concern for the Gospel, they would go wherever they had to go and sleep wherever they had to sleep in order to elect a president who represented their hope for the future of the SBC.
Where does the SBC stand now? Can we look back at the conservative resurgence and say the theological issues were settled forever? Absolutely not. Southern Baptists are now exceptional in the broader theological world. On same-sex marriage and a host of other cultural issues, the SBC is consistently recognized by the news media as being the one exception to a trend of churches acquiescing to liberal agendas. We cannot take confidence in that exceptionalism, for that would be a false confidence established on a very flimsy hope. In the conservative resurgence, the SBC was given a second chance, not a guaranteed future. It was not given a pass from history or from the theological debates of the future.
If that is the case, then Southern Baptists have to grow out of a posture of inherent defensiveness and move to a positive agenda that takes delight in confessing the faith and that points to the glory of God in the comprehensive embrace of biblical truth. We live in a day that is averse to theology and irritated by doctrine. If Southern Baptists find themselves being irritated by doctrinal questions, we will soon find ourselves sharing the fate of the mainline denominations – just slightly delayed. The tectonic plates of the contemporary theological landscape are shifting. Southern Baptists must accept the challenge of confronting these issues, not merely by defending against them, but by actually using contemporary debates to proclaim a theological reality that is firmly grounded in Scripture.
Of first importance in this challenge is a full embrace of classical orthodoxy. For one thing, we must be unapologetic in speaking about tradition. G.K. Chesterton was not the first to invoke the "democracy of the dead." Even the author of Hebrews refers to one who, "though he died, still speaks" (Heb 11:4). Tradition – that backward glance at what Christians throughout the centuries have confessed and how they have understood the great doctrines of the faith – allows the dead to have a vote. We are not the first persons to read the Bible, nor are we the first to confess the Christian faith. We must therefore distinguish between tradition and traditionalism. As Jaroslav Pelikan has noted, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living; tradition is the living faith of the dead. Moreover, fully embracing classical orthodoxy will require us to move beyond the issues of urgent and immediate debate to an embrace of the whole. The alternative is to be constantly dealing with peripheral matters and never with the center of the faith.
Second, we need to return to a robust confessionalism. Just as Michael Walzer argues that there are "thin ethics" and "thick ethics," we might speak of thin confessionalism and thick confessionalism. A thin confessionalism is one that is merely a matter of requirement – a signature and a statement of allegiance and subscription. Doctrine is a contract rather than a covenant. Thick confessionalism, on the other hand, understands that it is a privilege for a person to say, "I stand on these truths with this covenanted community. And as a matter of mutual accountability before God, and under the authority of Scripture, we join together to hold ourselves accountable to contend faithfully for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, even as we address the urgent issues of the contemporary hour." This is the kind of confessionalism our Baptist forebears espoused, and it is the kind we must recover in the 21st century.
Third, we need to seek a recovery of Baptist principles. On regenerate church membership, for instance, there has been too much compromise. Baptist ecclesiology is not merely a matter of church organization. It stands at the very center of the Baptist vision and goes to the very heart of our theology. When Baptist principles are compromised, everything is affected – including our understanding of the Gospel, the work of regeneration and the role of a covenant community as the congregation of faith.
Fourth, we must recover the discipline of theological "triage," a word normally associated with the emergency room. Patients are brought in with a great variety of injuries – sprained wrists, gunshot wounds, slight stomachaches, and spider bites. In that situation, someone has to make an evaluation of what is most urgent and what can wait; otherwise, confusion will reign. That triage nurse in the emergency room provides a good model for our theological debates.
In the vast world of theological controversy, there are first order issues, second order issues, and third order issues. Unfortunately, most of our time is usually spent dealing with secondary and tertiary issues, when we should be focusing our attention on the primary issues. Primary issues are those that distinguish Christians from non-Christians. I remember a student once asking Lewis Drummond how one should relate to Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ. Drummond replied, "You relate to them as lost people." He was exactly right. Those who deny the bodily resurrection are not believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is a first order issue.
Second order issues are those that would prevent two Christians from joining the same covenant community, even though they would still call one another "Christians." A church, for instance, will either baptize babies or it will not. A church will either ordain women as pastors or it will not. This does not mean we would necessarily say that those who ordain women as pastors are non-Christians; nor would we say that those who baptize babies are non-Christians. Nevertheless, we must affirm without apology that a theological seminary, a denomination, and even individual churches will have to stand with one confession, not a multiplicity of diverse choices. These second order issues are the right place to focus much of our debate, so long as we remember where they rank.
Third order issues are those that would not prevent two Christians from joining together in a covenant community. These are not unimportant issues; all truth is important. Yet they are not of such importance that disagreement on them means we cannot cooperate with each other. Many current debates within our churches – including everything from questions about the timing of the millennium to issues of cultural engagement – stand on this third level. As such, they are ripe for discussion, but they should not become cause for division.
Without the discipline of theological triage, we are constantly at risk of confusing third order issues for first order issues – the original besetting sin of fundamentalism. At the same time, we are also at risk of mistaking first order issues for third order ones – the besetting sin of liberalism. Keeping our equilibrium requires that our triage be clear and self-conscious, articulated, and accountable.
Conclusion
For all the challenges we will face in the future, this is a great time to be a Baptist. We now have the opportunity to recover our nonconformist roots. That is where we began. We were outsiders, not insiders. In fact, Baptists are always better when we are outsiders. When Baptists are forced to be nonconformists, we are forced to go back home. We have an opportunity now to think more clearly about what it means to be a Baptist, to be a covenanted community, and to be a Christian in communion with like-minded, Christ-professing, mutually accountable believers.
We have an opportunity to rekindle the Baptist vision of the church. Baptists have always understood Christianity in the context of the congregation. There can be no lone rangers, no theme of personal autonomy. Baptists understand that we are mutually accountable to each other. It is in the context of the covenanted community – where Word and Spirit come together by the preaching of the Word and the nurture of Christian fellowship – that the Holy Spirit conforms us to the image of Christ.
We have an opportunity to reestablish our commitment to the consensus fide. Baptists are different from every other Christian denomination – and yet the same. We must remember that sameness as we stand together with others who stand with us in the faith, even if they do not stand with us in our own covenanted communities.
We have an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the confessionalism that was the high-water mark of the Baptist experience. The confession of faith was never an excuse or an invasion. It was simply a way of saying, "This is who we are, and this is how we intend to communicate what we believe both to the world and to each other."
We have an opportunity to restore church discipline in the congregation. Without discipline, we have a half-covenant, not a whole one. In the same way, we must re-energize evangelism, recognizing the challenge we face in ethnic, metropolitan, and urban realties. This is the challenge of a national denomination with an international mission.
Lastly, we have an opportunity now to reach out to a world desperately in need of hope, help, and the Gospel. We are the vessels of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Missions is the heartbeat of our denomination precisely because we believe that "whosoever will may come," and that "all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved." We believe that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ, and therefore we go, for without a preacher they will not hear.
When John F. Kennedy was running for President in 1960, N.Y. Stevens, who carried the Democratic banner from 1952 to 1956, advised him concerning religion. He said, "Senator, a politician's best refuge is a vague faith strongly held, or a strong faith vaguely held." What God requires from Southern Baptists, however, is a strong faith strongly held. That alone points the way to the Baptist future.
NOTE: This article was presented as an address at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee, April 6, 2004. For a full treatment of this topic see the Spring 2005 issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.
[R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president and Joseph Emerson Brown professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Article reprinted from The TIE, The Southern Baptist Seminary Magazine, Fall 2005.]