Posted on 10/11/2010 7:55:48 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
When evangelist Billy Graham, social activist Jim Wallis, pastor Rick Warren, theologian Al Mohler and author Brian McLaren all can fit under the umbrella term “evangelical,” some theological and cultural observers wonder if the term has lost its meaning.
And at the same time, some Baptists who either continue to identify themselves as Southern Baptist or grew up in that tradition question whether the label fits them.
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On the right, some Southern Baptists have embraced engagement with evangelicals in conservative Christian political concerns, but they question how long their denomination can maintain fellowship with a movement with such broad parameters.
“Southern Baptists and other evangelical groups may be ships passing in the night,” wrote Steve Lemke, provost of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, in a paper on “The Future of Southern Baptists as Evangelicals,” delivered in 2005 at a Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary conference. “Many evangelical institutions seem to be shifting to the left, while Southern Baptists have made a sharp course correction to the right.”
On the other hand, some Baptists who hold to strict separation of church and state have shied away from the term “evangelical” because they believe it has be co-opted by the Religious Right. That tendency could be seen early in a 1976 Newsweek magazine cover story, “Born Again! The Year of the Evangelicals.” In it, a noted Southern Baptist ethicist and agency head emphatically sought to distance himself and his denomination from the growing movement.
“We are not evangelicals. That’s a Yankee word,” the late Foy Valentine, then executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, told religion reporter Kenneth Woodard. “They want to claim us because we are big and successful and growing every year.
“But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together. We don’t share their politics or their fussy fundamentalism, and we don’t want to get involved in their theological witch hunts.”
But things changed in the intervening 34 years. Decades of bitter denominational controversy transformed the landscape.
• A survey conducted by LifeWay Research for Outreach magazine recently named the largest and fastest growing churches in the nation. While some of the top five in each category have Baptist roots, only one—Second Baptist in Houston, the country’s third-largest congregation—has the word “Baptist” in its name.
• Many Baptist churches sing the same praise and worship choruses as independent evangelical congregations.
• Denominational gatherings generally pale in attendance compared to conferences sponsored by networks of evangelical megachurches.
• And the six seminaries supported by the Southern Baptist Convention no longer have a virtual monopoly on educating the next generation of ministers.
“Looking at theological education, when I began teaching, the Association of Theological Schools was dominated by the Ivy League schools and by the mainline denominational seminaries. Today, ATS is dominated by the evangelical schools. Nearly all the largest seminaries are evangelical. It’s a different ballgame,” said James Leo Garrett, distinguished professor emeritus at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of Baptist Theology: A Four-Century Study.
A 1983 book by Garrett and Glenn Hinson sought to answer the question, “Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals?”
Hinson took the position that Southern Baptists and evangelicals shared some common ground, rooted in the Protestant Reformation. But he insisted Baptists in general—and Southern Baptists in particular—placed priority on the experience of voluntary, uncoerced faith. Evangelicals, on the other hand, emphasized objective, propositional truth as they believed it be revealed in Scripture.
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Garrett, in contrast, classified Southern Baptists as “denominational evangelicals.” He noted they shared with evangelicals in general a commitment to the authority of Scripture, Christ-centered doctrine, gospel proclamation, the experience of grace and the imperative of evangelistic and missions endeavors.
Garrett believes events in the years since his and Hinson’s book have validated his position.
“Fewer Baptists today would utterly deny that Southern Baptists are evangelical,” he said.
As far as his designation of Southern Baptists as “denominational” evangelicals, Garrett said if many Southern Baptists today look more generically evangelical than distinctively Baptist, he cites two causes—failure to teach distinctive Baptist principles and fallout from denominational in-fighting.
“One of the greatest causes of dropping Baptist identity has been 30 years of controversy,” he observed.
But while some Baptists have discarded their own de-nominational label, others have shied away from the term “evangelical” because of the political baggage it carries.
Theologian William Brackney regrets that tendency. In an article for EthicsDaily.com, he emphasized his belief that the evangelical label is among those “terms above being hijacked for special purposes.”
“I use it in a particular way—to denote any professing Christian who defines faith in the context of Scripture, who understands Jesus Christ as a unique union of God and humanity, and who holds to the necessity of conversion and vital Christian experience and witness,” wrote Brackney, professor of Christian theology and ethics at Acadia University and Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia.
“I happen to believe that ‘evangelical’ legitimately applies to groups or persons in Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox categories, regardless of race, gender, lifestyle or socio-economic status.”
Although Brackney says he uses the term to describe “gospel-friendly people of many different stripes,” he acknowledges some use to it describe a particular social, political and cultural viewpoint rather than a doctrinal commitment.
“A whole new phenomenon has arisen in political evangelicalism that is identified with anti-abortion, opposition to same-sex unions, anti-big government, anti-socialism, anti-Islam racial profiling, as well as pro-individualism, pro-capitalism and various degrees of neo-nationalism,” he wrote.
But, Brackney and Garrett agreed, whatever its shortcomings, the evangelical label finds its grounding in Scripture. For a people who emphasize the authority of the Bible, it’s difficult to argue with that.
“It’s rooted in the good news of the gospel,” Garrett said. “It’s hard to make an argument for a better term.”
“But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together. We don’t share their politics or their fussy fundamentalism, and we don’t want to get involved in their theological witch hunts”....
....A 1983 book by Garrett and Glenn Hinson sought to answer the question, “Are Southern Baptists Evangelicals?”
Hinson took the position that Southern Baptists and evangelicals shared some common ground, rooted in the Protestant Reformation. But he insisted Baptists in general—and Southern Baptists in particular—placed priority on the experience of voluntary, uncoerced faith. Evangelicals, on the other hand, emphasized objective, propositional truth as they believed it be revealed in Scripture.
Garrett, in contrast, classified Southern Baptists as “denominational evangelicals.” He noted they shared with evangelicals in general a commitment to the authority of Scripture, Christ-centered doctrine, gospel proclamation, the experience of grace and the imperative of evangelistic and missions endeavors.
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A Northern Baptist says “There ain't no hell”!
A Southern Baptist says “The hell they ain't”!
Brother Dave Gardner
The term [Fundamentalism] was born when conservative Protestants in early-20th-century America committed themselves to defend the five "fundamentals" of their faith -- the inerrancy of the Bible, virgin birth and deity of Jesus, doctrine of atonement, bodily resurrection of Jesus, and His imminent return.
-- from the thread The many forms of fundamentalism
Fundamentalist: A term created during the turn-of-the-20th-century Protestant church splits to define those who held to the “fundamentals” of Christianity—the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Jesus and his literal resurrection from the dead. The term is now considered pejorative. (Wheaton College philosophy professor Alvin Plantinga famously observed, “The full meaning of the term…can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine.’”)
-- from the thread New Kids In The Flock
"I find it amusing that it was Calvinists and Presbyterians who came up with the "Five Fundamentals" (where the perjorative "fundamentalist" comes from) as an ecumenical tool to find common ground with Christians of all persuasions (including Catholics and Orthodox). I myself can find fruitful, common ground with any and all Trinitarian Christians (Trinitarianism being my personal "outermost circle" for defining Christianity."
-- Alex Murphy, September 17, 2010
"Just two years ago, Rick Warren was saying that "fundamentalists" (i.e. Presbyterians and their followers who adhere to the Presbyterians' Doctrinal Deliverance of 1910 more commonly known as the Five Fundamentals of the [Christian] Faith), hold to a very legalistic, narrow view of Christianity. So why does Warren invoke the memory of Schaeffer, a fundamentalist Presbyterian, to defend actions that Schaeffer wouldn't have approved of?"Related threads:
-- Alex Murphy, December 28, 2006
Readers should understand that churches making up the Southern Baptist Convention actually total a minority of Baptist churches in the United States, and should not necessarily be considered representative of Baptists in General. in the United States
Baptist= once in grace always in grace.My mother told me that all my life as her grandmother told her. there are some bad off shoots of the Baptist church and I dont hear and condemnation of them from the main church...
Southern Baptist is the largest Baptist Association, and they are the largest church group in America next to the Catholic church.
And still, SBC churches are very much less than half of the Baptist churches in the United States, and send an even smaller percentage of Baptist missionaries world wide.
The associations and fellowships of "independent" Baptist churches now make up a much larger number, and this does not even begin to account for the many thousands of Baptist churches which are not affiliated with any convention, association, or fellowship whatsoever, or the Baptist missionaries that are sent directly from their home churches.
Because there are so many that are entirely non-affiliated, their numbers are far under-counted in many surveys such as those used in these kinds of articles.
Using a proper sampling of telephone directories would actually give a more accurate count of churches than asking the headquarters of conventions and associations. And even this would not account for significant numbers independent Baptist churches, very many of which are not listed at all, or their listing is non-specific (usually intentionally).
We have 104 individual independent Baptist churches which contribute to our missionary work, and it is all we can do to keep up with the changes in their contact information. Probably one/third of them are not listed even in telephone directories, even though they each would have at least a hundred folks in attendance on Sundays.
We notice that secular surveys and religious surveys often use the Southern Baptist Convention as the basis of their counting of Baptists. And this is because, as you say, the SBC is the largest non-Catholic denomination in the USA.
The problem is, if the survey involves what Baptists believe, or what political, social, or philosophical tendencies they have, the survey takers are not getting the views of more than half of the Baptists in the country.
I find that long of a post in bold, too difficult to read.
But I assume that my post 7 was accurate.
You were accurate only to the extent that the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest single convention of Baptist churches.
If it is to be inferred that that makes them either a majority of Baptists in the USA, or that that makes their views representative of Baptists in a broader sense, then THAT would certainly NOT be accurate.
Wasn’t my entire post correct? Also, wouldn’t the Southern Baptists, be the largest single Baptist voice?
I don’t recall anyone ever saying that Southern Baptists made up the majority of Baptists.
Southern Baptists seem to be the biggest Baptist voice in America though, and they seem to be very conservative.
It infers an incorrect notion
"Also, wouldn’t the Southern Baptists, be the largest single Baptist voice?"
That voice would represent considerably less than half of all Baptists in the USA.
"I don’t recall anyone ever saying that Southern Baptists made up the majority of Baptists.
But the implication is made, even as you seek to suggest it in this last post, that the "voice" of the SBC carries some authority for the bulk of Baptist peoples in the USA, which should not be implied, simply because it is not true.
"Southern Baptists seem to be the biggest Baptist voice in America though, and they seem to be very conservative."
The SBC should just speak for itself, and not as having any overreaching voice for the greater number of Baptists in the USA.
Conservative? Well . . . ???? One reason that the independent Baptist movement exists, and the reason that so many on the Southern Baptist roles act as independents and don't support the SBC Cooperative Program is because the SBC "conservatism" is just such a loose "conservatism," always on the verge of liberalism.
LoL, You obviously have some burrs under your skin about Southern Baptists, that makes you want to construct something that isn’t there in my post.
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