Posted on 10/24/2025 1:37:29 PM PDT by Cronos
Social media buzzed with reaction when Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary theology professor Matthew Barrett announced his departure from the SBC to become an Anglican. He cited the “beauty of Anglicanism” and claimed its practices better align with “how Christians have worshipped across history.” But a cadre of Baptist theologians who focus on connecting Southern Baptists with the broader Christian tradition disagree. They say Baptist churches are fertile ground to draw from the Christian church’s theological roots—including fourth- and fifth-century formulations of the doctrines of the Trinity and the person of Christ. Baptists must retrieve “the roots of our own tradition that extend back into the Great Tradition” of Christian theology, said Steve McKinion, professor of theology and patristic studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The SBC has come from “that Great Tradition. We don’t have to figure out a way to remain true to it.” “Historic Christian tradition” Barrett, who served eight years at Midwestern, offered three reasons for leaving the SBC in a July 24 blog post. First, he rejected Baptists’ belief in congregational church polity in favor of presbyterian and episcopal forms of church government that he claimed “are far more consistent with the whole of Acts.” Second, he rejected believer’s baptism in favor of infant baptism, citing Acts 2:39. His third reason for leaving was that the SBC opted not to include the Nicene Creed in its confession of faith, The Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M). In response to two motions at the 2024 SBC Annual Meeting, the SBC Executive Committee declined to recommend the appointment of a task force to add historic confessions to the BF&M. “I cannot stay in a denomination where the Nicene Creed has been officially rejected from inclusion,” Barrett wrote. Barrett’s interest in the Nicene Creed relates to his participation in a debate among theologians over “eternal functional subordination of the Son” (EFS), the notion that while God the Father and God the Son are equal in essence, the eternal relations between the Father and the Son involve authority and submission. Barrett, who has joined the faculty of Trinity Anglican Seminary in Pennsylvania, rejects EFS and claims it is inconsistent with the Nicene Creed. Some Southern Baptists, led by theology professor Bruce Ware of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advocate EFS. Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler does not hold to EFS but has argued it falls within Christian orthodoxy. So, has the Nicene Creed been rejected in the SBC? Is the high church worship of denominations like Anglicanism and Eastern Orthodoxy more theologically rich? No, say scholars at the Center for Baptist Renewal, a think tank of Southern Baptists committed to what they call “retrieval of the Great Tradition for the renewal of Baptist faith and practice.” “Throughout Baptist history, most of our forbears saw nothing wrong with retrieving and introducing people to the theology of the creeds and church fathers,” said Brandon Smith, cofounder of the Center for Baptist Renewal and a theology professor at Oklahoma Baptist University. “The key was: these Baptist pastors and theologians did so as committed Baptists who introduced these ideas through the lens of Baptist identity. So, what we do not need is more fear about people leaving the Baptist tradition if they read the creeds; rather, we need more committed Baptists showing people why the Christian past is part of our heritage too.” While Southern Baptists declined to add the Nicene Creed to the BF&M, messengers to this year’s SBC Annual Meeting in Dallas identified themselves with the Nicene Creed in a resolution on the BF&M and the Cooperative Program. “From our confessional beginnings,” the resolution stated, “Baptists have identified ourselves with the historic Christian tradition, especially on the doctrines concerning Christ and the Trinity as exemplified, for example, by the Nicene Creed.” From Nicaea to Nashville Malcolm Yarnell, a research professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a fellow at the Center for Baptist Renewal, disagrees with Barrett’s arguments about congregationalism and baptism. He also noted that “Baptists in the Southwest have long advocated using creeds to express orthodox biblical interpretation.” Late Southwestern Seminary professor James Leo Garrett argued “the Trinitarian dogma of the early church was presumed by early Baptists,” Yarnell said. Southwestern theologians L.R. Scarbrough, W.T. Conner and B.H. Carroll all affirmed the creeds of the early church. Current professors at the seminary “regularly use the Great Tradition to defend Christianity against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and other cults.” W.A. Criswell, a former SBC president and longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, preached a months-long series of Wednesday sermons on confessions of faith. In that 1974 series, he affirmed the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, among other early church confessions, as expressing the Bible’s teaching. A 2020 book published by B&H Academic,"Baptists and the Christian Tradition" featured essays by more than a dozen contributors arguing that Baptist faith and practice align with the Christian tradition. The book’s foreword asked, “What hath Nicaea to do with Nashville?” Plenty, it concluded. Still, Barrett isn’t the only notable defection from low church evangelicalism to high church traditions like Anglicanism. Author and speaker Beth Moore left the SBC for Anglicanism. Former Evangelical Theological Society president Francis Beckwith left evangelicalism to become a Roman Catholic. Campus Crusade for Christ leader Peter Gillquist left evangelicalism for Eastern Orthodoxy in the 1970s, as did the son of evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer in the 1990s. McKinion, who also serves as a fellow with the Center for Baptist Renewal, said he receives calls from Southern Baptists thinking about becoming Anglican. He attempts to steer them in a different direction. “They think, ‘If I become Anglican, I will be more like the early church,’” McKinion said. But the Anglican “Book of Common Prayer” and Anglican polity were not “present in the ancient church the way they are present in the modern Anglican Church … All those aspects of practice are cultural.” Historically, the larger migration has been from Anglicanism to Baptist churches. “The Baptist movement began with a mass migration from the Church of England,” Yarnell said, “including the first leaders of the General Baptists and the Particular Baptists.” They became convinced that believer’s baptism and congregational church government were scriptural. Most growth in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), the theologically conservative denomination to which Barrett went, has come from liberal Anglican denominations rather than low church evangelicals. Nearly every ACNA diocese reported attendance increases over the past two years. In contrast, the theologically liberal Episcopal Church USA has lost nearly a third of its average worship attendance over the past decade, reporting just over 400,000 average attendance in 2023. Michael Haykin, a church history professor at Southern Seminary and a Center for Baptist Renewal fellow, said he finds facets of Anglicanism appealing, including its liturgy. He even uses “The Book of Common Prayer” as a model for a liturgical service he leads once a month at his local Baptist church. But he remains “a confirmed Baptist.” “I am well aware that there are other traditions besides the Baptist one (that of Anglicanism, for example) that have been witnesses to the purity of New Testament doctrine,” Haykin wrote in a blog post released the same day as Barrett’s. “But I deem the Particular Baptist stream to best represent NT life and polity. And having lived and breathed that world of late Antiquity, the previous sentence is not lightly made.” Though defections from the SBC garner attention, the movement within the Convention to reconnect with the Christian tradition has gained steam. The Center for Baptist Renewal lists nearly 40 Southern Baptist fellows on its website, including Southwestern Seminary president David Dockery. “What it means to be Southern Baptist,” McKinion said, “is to have received within a particular context that Great Tradition.”
“He cited the “beauty of Anglicanism”...”
“for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”
2 Corinthians 11:14
Probably has more to do with moral and social issues.
He converted to the Anglican Church of North America, which is theologically conservative and split from the Episcopal group some time ago
fwdude,
CS Lewis was Anglican.
Not only was C.S. Lewis Anglican, but wasn’t the Southern Baptist convention founded to PROMOTE, DEFEND, and ENSHRINE human SLAVERY in AMERICA?
The Anglican church just split as well within the past couple of weeks. That indicates the existence of an intolerable liberal wing.
As per what he has said in the months since, it was because on reading Scripture with early Christian writings, he was that his earlier views were not compatible with what Christians in the first 1600 years of Christianity believed
Yes, in a completely different Age. Those Anglicans would never recognize the current crop.
The Anglican “communion” ie group of independent churches under the umbrella of Anglicanism split.
There was no one church uniting the ACNA, the church of England, the ECUSA, etc.
The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) split from The Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada to form a new, separate ecclesiastical structure, which was officially formed in 2009. This split was driven by theological differences particularly regarding issues like same-sex marriage, and the ACNA is not considered part of the global Anglican Communion in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The ACNA is not in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and is therefore not part of the official Anglican Communion. It is in communion with GAFCON (Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans), a coalition of conservative evangelical Anglicans.
Agreed. My money is it's less to do with things like infant baptism vs adult baptism or Calvinism vs Arminianism and more to do with him embracing the modern hedonism that the Anglican and other "high church" denominations promote.
Yes, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 to defend the institution of slavery. The split with Northern Baptists occurred because northern church leaders refused to allow slaveholders to serve as missionaries, leading Southern Baptists to form their own denomination to protect the right to own slaves.
In 1995, the denomination issued an apology for its historical racism, including its role in slavery. While the founding motive is rooted in the defense of slavery, today the SBC is a large and racially diverse denomination with affiliated churches across the United States.
My original point was that chasing after “beauty” as your religion is a seriously flawed method.
You would lose your money.
It is more about his conservative beliefs seeing the beliefs he had as being 16th and 17th century innovations. He joined the conservative ACNA which split from the ECUSA. The ACNA rejects homosexuality and women priestesses.
I would suggest reading beyond the first line.
This Southern Baptist seminary professor saw that the ACNA practices better align with “how Christians have worshipped across history.”
Barrett, who served eight years at Midwestern, offered three reasons for leaving the SBC in a July 24 blog post. First, he rejected Baptists’ belief in congregational church polity in favor of presbyterian and episcopal forms of church government that he claimed “are far more consistent with the whole of Acts.” Second, he rejected believer’s baptism in favor of infant baptism, citing Acts 2:39.
His third reason for leaving was that the SBC opted not to include the Nicene Creed in its confession of faith,
BEAUTY, TRUTH, and GOODNESS point to GOD. Ugliness, sterility, utility, soul-less nature of American architecture in general, American-inspired low churches both here and abroad is NOTHING to be proud of.
CHARLIE KIRK said it best:
...The trend that we are seeing is a very positive one. People are seeking tradition...It's a learning lesson for a lot of pastors I talk to. If you are not creating an environment where the people that come to your church can find holiness and meaning and be elevated, you're not doing your job.
There was a time in the nineties where people were hungry for a personal encounter with God, and Evangelicalism I think offers that better than some Catholicism circles. Maybe that's to be debated, but times change and needs an appetites change. And I could tell you on Saturday evening, I wanted to honor Our Lord the night before the Resurrection, so I knew the local Catholic church was doing an Easter vigil. Mind you, this goes from eight pm to midnight. An Easter vigil is a very long standing tradition in the Catholic Church, where they read basically almost the entire Bible.
I go there and I couldn't find a seat at ten pm at night on a Saturday night, and over half the people there were people my age. It was like a selfie line just trying to get in there...I said, is this a Turning Point rally or is this an Easter vigil?
I'm not Catholic, but I went there because when I walk into that specific Catholic church, it points up. It's not a Costco with a rock band and a Ted Talk and good coffee. To be honest, I've had enough of that. I don't want to go to Sam's Club to go to church in a school gym. Kind of enjoyed the holiness, the beauty, the pageantry, the structure, the tradition of the reverence. So I totally get it. God bless those churches for elevating our soul.
His main stickler was the theological innovation in the SBC of “eternal functional subordination of the Son” (EFS), the notion that while God the Father and God the Son are equal in essence, the eternal relations between the Father and the Son involve authority and submission.
Some Southern Baptists, led by theology professor Bruce Ware of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advocate EFS. Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler does not hold to EFS but has argued it falls within Christian orthodoxy.
Barrett rejects EFS and claims it is inconsistent with the Nicene Creed.
modern* American architecture.
If he got tired of churches that were indistinguishable from Wal-Mart and strip malls, and wannabe rock concerts that aren’t even good. It is not only understandable, but likely the Holy Spirit wincing in his soul, crying out for the beauty and transcendence of GOD.
Those “Churches” are businesses. They operate as such.
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