Replies

With regard to Phelps' church, it would have failed the first distinctive listed in the source you cited: acceptance of the New Testament only as the authority on matters of church polity, practice, and doctrine. Their condemnations of homosexuals and governments are based on the Old Testament, specifically Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

I think you may be mistaken, but going with your POV, which I find mistaken, if specific Mosaic prohibitions of illicit relationships are not specifically repeated in the NT (and I don't believe they are), then Independent Fundamental Baptists won't use them for doctrine ? I read his statement of the first distinctive as using "church" as an adjective for all three nouns "polity," "practice," and "doctrine" so that only the NT is used specifically for local church administration. If IFBs have thrown out the OT, they are heretical.

The Pauline epistles condemn homosexuality (e.g., Romans 1), but the Westboro Baptist Church belief that sodomites should be executed by the civil authorities is a doctrine not carried over into the New Testament from the Old. Dispensationalists, a camp that includes independent fundamental Baptists as well as others (many Southern Baptists, most independent Bible churches, many charismatics and pentecostals) believe in Biblical inerrancy but also believe that the moral law of the Old Testament was applicable only to the Jewish people. If the moral law is reaffirmed in the New Testament, for example, nine of the ten commandments (the exception being the Sabbath), then it is applicable to believers under the New Covenant.