MAINSTREAM MESSENGER
Vol. 3, No. 2 April 2000
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“Soul competency” had a negative impact. “The result was an autonomous individualism that has infected the Southern Baptist Convention, and now widespread has infected evangelicalism.” Al Mohler President, Southern Seminary, 1993-Present Member, 2000 committee revising the Baptist Faith and Message |
“There are certain basic things generally held by Baptists today as through past years. But underlying all of them has been the principle of soul competency in religion.” Herschel Hobbs Pastor, First Baptist Oklahoma City, 1949-1971 Chair, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message committee |
Identifying the Mainstream of Baptist Life
By Dr. Bruce Prescott
Since 1925 the Mainstream of Southern Baptist life has been identified by the confession of faith known as the “Baptist Faith and Message” (BFM). Key members of the SBC committee now revising the confession are beginning to make statements that reveal how far the current revisers of the BFM have drifted from Mainstream Baptist convictions.
On March 30th Al Mohler, current President of Southern Seminary and a member of the committee revising the BFM, publicly declared that the emphasis of Mainstream Baptists on “soul competency,” (sometimes referred to as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers), “infected” the SBC with “autonomous individualism” and led it into liberalism.
Both E.Y. Mullins and Herschel Hobbs, believed that the emphasis on “the soul’s competency in religion under God” is at the very heart of being Baptist. Mullins chaired the 1925 committee that wrote the BFM. Hobbs chaired the 1963 committee that made a few minor changes to the 1925 statement and resubmitted it to the SBC for adoption.
Mullins responded to earlier critics like Mohler in his 1908 book The Axioms of Religion. Regarding “the competency of the soul in religion” he said, “Of course, this means a competency under God, not a competency of human self-sufficiency.”
Hobbs explicitly aligned himself with Mullins on this issue. He quoted from Mullins book in his 1962 Presidential address to the SBC, quoted it again in his 1971 book on the Baptist Faith and Message (pp. 8-9) and revised an edition of Mullins book that was printed in 1978. Hobbs underscored the significance of belief in “soul competency” when he wrote, “The Baptist Faith and Message of Southern Baptists is based upon the competency of the soul in religion.” (Baptist Faith and Message, p. 12)
Some Baptists have never been in the Mainstream of Baptist life. In 1925 Fundamental Baptists like J. Frank Norris thought the BFM was too liberal. Norris left the SBC in the late 1920’s and founded the Independent Baptist movement (now led by Jerry Falwell).
In 1964 some SBC Fundamentalists dissatisfied with the 1963 BFM were already forming groups to work to change it. They formally organized in 1973 under the name of the "Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship." Their primary goal was to get Baptists to adopt a more “conservative” statement of Baptist doctrine. The BFM Fellowship was the beginning of the "conservative resurgence" that took control of the SBC in the 1980’s and redirected it toward the beliefs of Norris’ Independent Baptists.
I learned about the differences between Mainstream Baptists and Fundamentalists when I was a teenager. I made a public profession of faith in Christ and was baptized as a believer into an SBC church in 1964. At that time my pastor handed me a copy of the freshly issued 1963 BFM. That confession of faith was my introduction to Bible doctrine, biblical interpretation and Baptist beliefs. Outside the Bible itself, the Mullins/Hobbs BFM has exerted more influence over my thought and understanding than anything that I have ever read. It made me proud to be a Baptist. It gave me permission to think about my faith. It sparked in me an abiding interest in doctrine and theology. It also gave me a feel for the deepest spiritual currents flowing through the Mainstream of Baptist life.
More than anything else, the spirituality reflected in the BFM helped to guide me through the treacherous straits and shallow shoals of Fundamentalism. My encounter with Fundamental Baptists dates from 1966. That was the year my parents bought a new house. With the change in residence came a change in church membership. It was Baptist, but it was not Southern Baptist.
Fundamental Baptists have a different spirit than Southern Baptists. They tend to be authoritarian, intolerant and legalistic. At that time, none of those things mattered to me. It began to matter after I went to one of their youth camps and felt God’s call to give my life to the ministry. After that, I became a Fundamental Baptist "preacher boy" and my pastor began to groom me for ministry in Independent Baptist churches.
At first, such a possibility was appealing.
Independent Baptist preachers exercise a lot more uncontested authority and power than most Southern Baptist preachers. They rarely hold business meetings and they delegate no responsibilities to committees. The deacons meet once a year and then only to assist with the Lord’s Supper. The preacher is accountable to no one but God. As pastor, he shepherds the flock and his sheep had better follow him without question.
Gradually I began to have difficulty reconciling such pastoral authority with the doctrine of "individual soul competency under God " that I learned from the BFM.
Nor could I reconcile their fervent desire to subordinate the authority of the state to that of the church with what I read about religious liberty in the BFM. Long before 1970, when I moved my membership back to an SBC church, I knew from these doctrinal and spiritual differences that God was calling me to ministry in Southern Baptist churches rather than in Independent Fundamental Baptist churches.
Shortly after I returned to the SBC I was taken under wing by another group of ministers. They were SBC evangelists and pastors who learned that I was a preacher boy who came from an Independent Baptist church. They were involved with the "Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship" and considered me a ready ally in their movement to rid the SBC of "liberalism" and make it more like Independent Fundamental Baptists. The chief targets of their displeasure with the SBC were the Christian Life Commission, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, and the Seminaries.
Whenever I asked these evangelists and pastors why they did not leave the SBC and join Jerry Falwell and the Independent Baptists, they all sang the same tune. The refrain was that, if changed, the sheer size of the SBC would be a mighty force to bring "revival" to America. "Reviving America" for them, as for Independent Baptists, meant elevating the church above the state, legally declaring the United States to be a "Christian Nation," and requiring agents of the state (public school administrators and teachers) to force students to recite “state sanctioned” prayers (— as President of my school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter, I knew that the Supreme Court never outlawed student initiated voluntary prayer in schools).
Even as a college student I knew that what they had in mind was radically different from what Baptists usually meant by "revival."
When I was growing up, the word "revival" referred to the power of the Holy Spirit to transform hearts and change lives. Change began within an individual and spread from one person to another. To Mainstream Baptists a revival is a spiritual movement. Fundamentalists, however, use the word "revival" to talk about the power of a social movement to change the culture.
It begins with an election and spreads from one institution to another. In the words of Jerry Falwell on the PBS Series With God on Our Side, effecting change by individual spiritual transformation is “a correct premise. In reality, it doesn’t work out that way.” For Fundamental Baptists real revival is a political movement.
I could spot the error in what Fundamentalists were saying for two reasons. I had studied the BFM and I had read church training study course books on Baptist history. I knew Baptists had been persecuted by "state churches" in Europe and Colonial America. I knew that Baptists fought in the revolutionary war to secure religious liberty for themselves and for every other American — without regard for their religious or irreligious convictions. I knew that John Leland and Virginia Baptists refused to ratify the U.S. Constitution until the First Amendment was added to assure that church and state would not be united in America.
I knew that the necessity for separation of church and state was rooted in the biblical understanding of salvation and the Baptist concern for the spread of the gospel. Colonial Baptists knew that real faith could not be propagated by force of law. Enlisting the power of the state to compel Christian beliefs and practices violated the spirit of the gospel. It made the "good news" bad news.
That is why article 18 of the BFM states, "The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends." Moreover, I knew that the institutions and agencies that Fundamentalists had identified as "liberal" were all concerned to preserve and protect historic Baptist beliefs concerning salvation, religious liberty and the way the gospel should be spread.
Needless to say, those involved in the "Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship" did not succeed in enlisting me for their movement. They were opposed to the very things that made me a Southern Baptist. There was no doubt in my mind, however, that they were serious about changing the SBC and that they were building an organization that would help them accomplish their objectives.
By 1979 their organization was built and they began electing Fundamentalists to the presidency of the SBC. In those days most people discounted the movement as an extreme swing of a pendulum that would inevitably swing back to the historic Baptist "center." I wanted to believe them, but my own experience with the Fundamentalists convinced me that they were being underestimated. These Baptists had a different mind-set, played by different rules, and had a different goals than Mainstream Baptists.
In the early 1980’s, few doubted Fundamentalist leaders when they denied they were part of a movement to take over the convention. Five years later, those same Fundamentalist leaders were publicly trumpeting the success of their takeover and endorsing it as a model for how Christians could takeover political parties and acquire control of civil government.
Mainstream Baptists across the country have learned that trusting Fundamentalists is risky business. For Fundamentalists, the end always justified the means. During the 1980’s every Mainstream candidate for president of the SBC and every head of an SBC institution or agency found that half-truths, misrepresentations and outright lies all became the necessary means to achieve the Fundamentalist’s end. Today, even after the Fundamentalists have succeeded in replacing the head of every institution and agency in the SBC, one member of the SBC’s Executive Committee specializes in producing resources to defame Mainstream Baptists, Texas Baptists, Virginia Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
The plot to takeover the SBC is not a secret. Anyone who bothers to look can easily find open admissions and documentary evidence of a well defined strategy. (For documentation, ask us to send you a free copy of The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention: A Brief History by Rob James and Gary Leazer) The Fundamentalist’s plan was to elect the presidents of the SBC for ten consecutive years. Their presidents would only appoint Fundamentalists to be trustees of SBC institutions and agencies. Their trustees would replace the heads of all the SBC institutions and agencies with Fundamentalists.
What has not been clear is the ultimate purpose for all the changes in the SBC. The Fundamentalist’s words sound pious. They say they want to exercise the full weight and force of every institution and agency in the SBC to bring "revival" to America. The kind of "revival" they are working toward is apparent to anyone who cares to look. It has little to do with the activity of God’s Spirit and much to do with social movements and power politics.
After the Fundamentalists took control of the SBC, they moved on to U.S. politics. The politics of abortion is the reason why the Home Mission Board (now called the North American Mission Board) diverted mission money from evangelism and church planting to set up an office to lobby in Washington, D.C. Politics are behind the defunding of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs (BJCPA) and the relocation of the Christian Life Commission (now called the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) from Nashville to Washington, D.C. The BJCPA exists only to remind Baptists of their heritage in securing religious liberty and to assist them in preserving the separation between church and state. Shortly after the new SBC lobbies were set up in the nation’s capital, Jerry Falwell cited them as his reason for disbanding the "Moral Majority." Southern Baptists used to stand against the subordination of the state to the church. Today, we are Falwell’s lackeys.
A few years ago Falwell’s church contributed ten thousand dollars to the new convention SBC Fundamentalists started to compete with the Mainstream dominated state convention in Virginia. In doing so, his church officially became a part of the SBC. Today his church is receiving $250,000 dollars from the North American Mission Board to send a pastor “handpicked” by Falwell to minister to his “television constituency” in Chicago. You can be sure that the location of this church start carries secular political implications.
Before the Fundamentalist takeover, Southern Baptists were bipartisan politically and spoke about ethical issues from a moral high ground. When our leaders kept the denomination above political processes, we were assured of having the moral authority to be heard by both political parties and by all sides on important issues.
Today the SBC is so entangled in the processes of secular politics that our leaders are national media spokespersons for the radical religious right. We have become so closely identified with a single political perspective that our voice is counted or discounted before we speak. Worse still are the perceptions our political involvements are creating in the minds of those to whom we have been called to minister. Nothing diminishes our ability to speak prophetically more than the perception that Baptists walk lock step in opposition to the purely civil and economic concerns of people who do not vote with the right wing fringe of the Republican party. Nothing undermines the credibility of the gospel in the world more than the perception that Christianity merely represents the temporal political concerns of some Americans rather than the eternal spiritual concerns of Christ.
Many Baptists have become alarmed at how Fundamentalism is destroying our reputation in the community of faith and how it is undermining the credibility of the gospel we have been called to proclaim. Mainstream Baptists are organizing across the country to give voice once again to the beliefs of the "historic" Baptist center.
In times past such a task would have been taken up by Baptist historians and theologians. Historians and theologians, however, traditionally serve as professors at seminaries. They have been silenced at the threat of losing their jobs. Those bold enough to speak out have been replaced. Their replacements disdain the convictions of Mainstream Baptists like Mullins and Hobbs.
Want proof? Conclusive evidence of the SBC’s drift from the Mainstream can be found in Southern Seminary’s theological journal. In the Winter 1999 issue, Sean Michael Lucas, associate director of the seminary’s Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that, “For over 70 years, Southern Baptists have harvested the shallow discipleship and vapid theology that resulted from sowing Mullins’ theological seeds of experience.” He went on to connect it with Henry Blackaby’s popular study on Experiencing God which he described as “imbalanced” and having “little doctrinal content.” Lucas added, “It would not be a far leap from discipleship with little doctrinal content to salvation with little orthodox doctrinal content.”
When Baptist historians and theologians openly deny that a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is central to our faith, how will Baptist laymen know what is truly central to Baptist life and thought?
Mainstream Baptists can provide you with the resources you need to find the center for yourself. Contact us at (405) 329-2266 and we can provide literature, books, speakers, and other resources that will assist you with your research.
Many Baptists will be able to find all they need in their own church library. See if you can find a copy of E.Y. Mullins’ The Axioms of Religion and/or a copy Herschel Hobb’s book on the Baptist Faith and Message. Compare those to the revised Baptist Faith and Message that Adrian Rogers’ committee submits to the SBC in June. Pay close attention to the preamble and the articles on scripture, the church, co-operation, and religious liberty and you’ll see how far the current SBC is from the beliefs of Mainstream Baptists like E.Y. Mullins and Herschel Hobbs.