Beyond the Impasse? Scripture, Interpretation and Theology in Baptist Life. - book reviews

Christian Century, April 14, 1993 by S. Mark Heim

From 1989 through 1991 conservative Southern Baptists consolidated institutional control of the country's largest Protestant denomination, and their moderate opponents moved to organize separate seminaries and mission structures. During these same years, four prominent representatives from each side committed themselves to a sustained dialogue on the issues that divide them. They sought some way to save the unity of this close-knit and unruly family. It appears a quixotic task, rather like the diplomatic activity in embassies of two nations that are at war but have not officially severed relations.

The energy these writers brought to the effort testifies to the depth of the bonds they feel. This is itself a striking fact, since the polity of Baptists requires few overarching structures to nourish this sense of the whole. Those outside the Baptist circle attend to the drama primarily as an emblem of a larger culture conflict, but for insiders it has the added poignancy of a civil war. The liberal and conservative constituencies of our society tend toward institutional segregation: in very few schools or churches or foundations is there sharp, open, balanced conflict. A congregation that "looked like America" - and spoke proportionally in all its voices - for instance, would be a singularly contentious body, very different from most of those we see. Like gravitates to like. While institutions or factions may clash, people associate at the personal level in groups where ideological conflict isn't common. The church's professed capacity to gather people of all political and ethnic stripes in a respectful mutuality often seems inadequate to overcome this dynamic.

Part of the fascination of the Southern Baptist struggle is this special character of intimacy and unavoidability, of neighbor against neighbor, church camp or seminary friend against friend, mentor and protege on opposite sides. In this sense it is similar to the conflicts that rend many public school systems. The fight is at home. By the broader culture's standards, moderate and conservative Southern Baptists may hardly represent polar extremes. But those bruised in the past decade can testify that the divisions are wide enough to harm and hurt.

These eight authors try to isolate the key biblical and theological issues that separate the sides and to suggest ways to go "beyond" the standoff. The results are not hopeful. Some could reach this conclusion without reading the book, insisting that the conflict is neither based in nor susceptible to resolution through such concerns: it is part of a larger battle over politics, cultural norms and morality into which a powerful religious institution has been enlisted. On such a view Southern Baptists are mistaken to think that this is their controversy at all. They are just the playing field.

This view explains some of what is happening, but not all. It does not understand even all that it explains, since public debates over cultural norms and morality are inextricably theological ones as well. In insisting on the theological dimensions to the conflict and in committing themselves to dialogue, these eight resist a simple politicization of the issues. They attempt to hold themselves accountable to Christian and Baptist standards. All indications are that the attempt is too little, by too few, and too late for the institutional unity of their denomination. But it is a worthy attempt.

Much of the discussion replays arguments among Baptists in the (then) Northern Baptist Convention earlier in this century during the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Separation was the eventual result in that case, forming the General Association of Regular Baptists and later the Conservative Baptist Association. Now as then much of the argument centers on the place of creeds in Baptist life.

Thus moderate Robison James argues passionately for Baptists' aversion to creeds and their confidence in scripture alone. It is not doctrine but a living relationship with Christ that is the heart of Baptist life, and all doctrine must take second place to this. He proposes that moderates and conservatives can differ over significant doctrines, even the doctrine of scripture, and yet share in missions, leadership and evangelism so long as the crucial question is "whether you and I are mutually related to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, living faithfully in him and for him." Timothy George objects that Baptists have in fact made consistent use of confessions of faith throughout their history, precisely to express the doctrinal truths held in common in the community. With George, Paige Patterson, one of the best-known architects of the SBCS conservative takeover, denies that there can be a relation to Christ that is prior to an doctrine, any more than in scripture one encounters a pristine historical Jesus.

Baptist life, with its congregational polity, its voluntary mission organization and its lack of binding juridical documents, depends heavily on high levels of family trust. This trust is built above the local level through commitment to shared mission tasks and through an ethos amalgamated of favorite hymns, preaching that rings with biblical imagery, and a vocabulary of personal testimony and prayer. Among Southern Baptists this was backed with centralized agencies like the Sunday School Board, which provided thousands of local classes with lessons and experiences shared from Florida to California.