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Correctly or mistakenly, many Southern Baptists find predestination and other doctrines difficult to comprehend and even provoking. We see how the Presbyterian and reforms churches are slowly declining, rightly or wrongly and don't want to follow that pattern.

Here is a good article....

Southern Baptists may wake up one Sunday soon and find they really aren't
Southern Baptists unless they are Presbyterians.

A growing movement is sweeping the denomination's seminaries over the role
and impact of historic Calvinist beliefs, especially the idea that
salvation is predetermined by God and there is nothing humans can do to
change who will be saved and who will be damned.

Most Southern Baptists - who make up the nation's largest Protestant
denomination - are evangelical, believing any sinner who seeks salvation
through Jesus Christ will receive eternal life.

The fight is being fueled by a wave of "Five Point Calvinism" that some
believe is washing over Baptist seminaries and infecting pulpits, and has
led to schism in some congregations. Five Point Calvinism is based on the
teaching of 16th-century Protestant reformer John Calvin and his views of
unconditional election and limited atonement, meaning God's choice of
certain individuals for salvation is conditioned only on God's sovereign
will and that Jesus' redeeming work on the cross was only to save those
already elected by God.

Churches in the Calvinist, or Reformed, tradition include Presbyterian
denominations, the Reformed Church in America and the United Church of
Christ.

For Baptists, at issue is this central question: If God has already
predetermined who goes to hell and who goes to heaven even before they're
born, why preach the Gospel? Why send missionaries to India? Why, indeed,
evangelize?

"The logical conclusion (of predestination) is that evangelism is useless,"
said W.R. Estep, professor emeritus of church history at Southwestern
Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, arguing that a strong belief in
predestination would pull the rug out from under Baptist evangelism.

Baptists, he said, have traditionally believed in the absolute freedom of
the human will to choose or reject salvation.

"Generally, Baptists have always held that God's plan of salvation was that
in Christ all people would have an opportunity to accept the invitation to
belief and to the Christian life and to become a disciple."

Some lay members, too, are concerned.

Kelly McGinley, a member of First Baptist Church of North Mobile, Ala.,
said she does not believe in Calvinism and would be upset if her pastor
started to teach it.

"It would give all those who don't like going to church something else to
make fun of us for," she said. "It might cool some people going to church.
. It's very scary."

Others argue, however, that the denomination needs to recover a notion of
the sovereignty of God and dismiss the fear that Calvinism leads to a
waning of evangelistic fervor.

"Our Lord died particularly for the sins of his elect people, accomplishing
their salvation from beginning to end - and for no one else," said the Rev.
Fred Malone, pastor of First Baptist Church in Clinton, La.

Malone is part of the Founders Conference, a loose-knit network of Southern
Baptist Calvinists who say their five-point doctrine was the theology of
most early leaders of what became the Southern Baptist Convention.

To many Christians who adhere to Calvinist precepts, however, the zeal to
evangelize is not quenched by belief in predestination.

"It was the most freeing thing that ever happened to me, to discover that
there was nothing I could do to win God's grace, that it had all been done
for me already," said Bob Norman, a member of Grace Fellowship Presbyterian
Church in Mobile, Ala.

Scholars say the debate goes back to the 17th century, when the Baptist
movement was first being formed.

According to Timothy George, dean of the Beeson School of Divinity at
Samford University in Birmingham, at that time there were two "streams" of
thought - the General Baptist tradition and the Particular Baptist
tradition.

The General Baptist tradition, George said, received some of the same
influences that shaped the Methodist movement and held that salvation was
by faith through grace, but that a person's free will to choose God's
redemption was necessary.

"Like (Methodist founder) John Wesley, they placed more emphasis on free
will, less emphasis on predestination," George said.

The Particular Baptist tradition, he said, involves a belief in "partial
redemption," or the belief that God has destined some people for salvation
and others for damnation. George said that when the Southern Baptist
Convention was founded in 1845, the vast majority of Baptists were
Particular Baptists, or Reformed Baptists.

"That was the founding doctrine of Southern Baptist life until the early
20th century, and there are some who want to recover that and see what it
has to offer to us today," he added.

But that direction has led to error in the past, George added. Deep within
the Baptist "consciousness" is a fear that Calvin's doctrine of
predestination will engender "hyper-Calvinism," an attitude of indifference
to those who are not saved and a reluctance to invest in evangelism or
missions work.

Estep, however, calls the movement "superficial intellectualism."

"It gives the person who thinks he's a Calvinist an intellectual frame of
reference and gives him a superior attitude toward others. He is not only
elect, but he has a system of theology that is not from his own research
but it looks good, is a consistent system and relieves him of the
responsibility of evangelism."

There have been churches in the Southern Baptist Convention that have
disintegrated or divided over the issue, Estep said. When preachers begin
to talk about predestination, their congregations conclude that missions
and evangelism programs are going to suffer.

"But I'm not sure that the Baptists in the pews know anything about Calvin
and care anything about these issues that the preachers get involved in,"
Estep added.

San Antonio Express-News
August 30, 1997
RELIGION NEWS SERVICE