That is tough to contemplate, for I love the Southern Baptist Church. I'm raising my kids in it, and never want to leave.
The book I shared with you is quite blatant. Dr. North claims that evangelicalism (that is, an insistence of experientialism over doctrine and covenant) is nothing more than a waystation between Calvinism and outright liberal heresy.
I think Dr. North takes it to an extreme that I probably wouldn't. He finds fault with those who would ask to hear of someone's Christian conversion to determine churhc membership, and I think in most cases that this is a good idea.
CROSSED FINGERS
How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
by Gary North
This book is the first to detail the step-by-step program of infiltration used by modernists to take over the Northern Presbyterian Church. Other books have chronicled the results of this program, but none has shown how it was done. The infiltration process began as early as 1870, and it culminated in the expulsion of the conservatives in 1936. This book shows that the modernists held a systematic theology that was a perverse mirror image of the Presbyterianism of the Westminster Confession. It presents the compromised midway theology of the majority wing of the Church: New School Presbyterians and fundamentalists (after 1910). I t also shows why the conservatives were unwilling to defend the Westminster Confession through court actions against heretics except in the 1890's, and even then, they refused to deal with many of the fundamental theological issues. The conservatives, from Charles Hodge to J. Gresham Machen, were themselves unwilling to accept all of the Confession, especially in the key area of creationism. Because they crossed their fingers when they swore allegiance to the Confession, the modernists also crossed theirs, and all but six of them got away with it. The conservatives were outfoxed time after time.Then, after 1907, the conservatives consented to a series of tactical moves that passed institutional power to the modernists and their pietistic allies. They did not understand what they had done until two decades after they had done it. By then, it was too late. This book also lists a series of red-alert signals that point to a replay of the liberals' strategy.
1096 pp., indexed, hardback, $34.95
Institute for Christian Economics, P.O. Box 8000, Tyler, Texas 75711
And for the free book online, go to...
http://www.freebooks.com/docs/243a_47e.htm