Baptist theology since 1950.

Humphreys, Fisher

If theology is thinking about God, then every Baptist has a theology.

Our subject in this paper is academic Baptist theology found in books and articles written since 1950 by pastor-theologians, lay theologians, and professors.

Bridge Theologies

Across the centuries the principal conversation partner for Christian theology has been philosophy, but sometimes theologians engage in dialogue with other disciplines. Since 1950 three of those disciplines have been literature, other religions, and science.

Baptists such as Paul Fiddes, John Killinger, and Ralph Wood have made contributions to the study of relationships between theology and literature.

Harvey Cox wrote about the relationship between Christianity and other religions in his 1988 book Many Mansions. Charles Kimball is an expert on Islam who once had the extraordinary experience of being asked by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to talk to him about Jesus. Mark Heim has written three books about other religions. In the third, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends, he makes the fascinating suggestion that the claims of the world religions about salvation may all be true because, even though they seem to be mutually exclusive, the religions understand salvation very differently. Buddhists may be right that the Eightfold Noble Path leads to Nirvana, and Christians may also be right that redemption leads to everlasting communion with the Holy Trinity.

In building bridges between theology and science, practicing scientists naturally possess special authority. At least three scientists who are or have been Baptists have made important contributions to this field. Charles Townes received the Nobel prize for work that led to lasers. Sir John Houghton is co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that received a Nobel Prize for its work. He is the author of The Search for God: Can Science Help? Francis Collins is a convert from agnosticism who during his years as a Baptist directed the largest scientific research project in history, the Human Genome Project. Now the director of the National Institutes of Health, he has written a book about science and theology titled The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Eric Rust, an English Baptist, taught at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary during the mid-twentieth century when Karl Barth's influence was discouraging theologians from exploring relationships between theology and science. Eric Rust rowed against that current and wrote repeatedly about science and theology.

Advocacy Theology

Theologians sometimes advocate for particular causes. For example, J. Deotis Roberts advocated for black theology in his 1971 book Liberation and Reconciliation, and Will D. Campbell did the same in his 1972 book Race and the Renewal of the Church. Jann Aldredge-Clanton advocated for feminist theology in her 1991 book In Whose Image? God and Gender. Miguel A. de la Torre advocated for Hispanic moral theology in his 2010 book Latino/a Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Moral Thinking.

Kinds of Theology

Academic theology embraces several distinct disciplines including biblical, historical, philosophical, moral, and pastoral theologies, along with systematic theology.

Biblical Theology

In some circles biblical theology is purely descriptive, simply displaying what is in the Bible. For Baptists the situation is more complicated. Because Baptists are so serious about having the Bible as their Holy Book, a description of the Bible's theological content is ipso facto a prescription that they believe it.

A good example of this is the work of Frank Stagg. His book New Testament Theology is the product of careful biblical scholarship wedded to the author's passionate concern about social and personal morality. It is not just an account of New Testament teachings; it is a call to live in the way of Jesus. Stagg also advocated for particular causes. His concern for racial justice is evident in a ground-breaking commentary on Acts in which he argued persuasively that the principal barriers the church had to cross in its struggle for an unhindered gospel were racial rather than geographical. He and his wife Evelyn wrote a book titled Woman in the World of Jesus in which they advocated for a change in women's role in the church and society.

Historical Theology

Baptists have excelled at the academic discipline of church history, especially at interpreting their own history and theology. Two outstanding examples are the "Makers of the Modern Theological Mind" series and the "Studies in Baptist History and Thought" series.

Baptist systematic theologians usually make use of historical theology in their work. During the past six decades this was done in an especially impressive way by James Leo Garrett in his two-volume work titled Systematic Theology.

Philosophical Theology

Although many Baptists have been interested in philosophy of religion, only a few have written philosophical theologies. Langdon Gilkey probably has been the most influential Baptist doing philosophical theology. His books include Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-language and Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Another Baptist philosophical theologian is Kenneth Cauthen whose major work is titled Systematic Theology: A Protestant Perspective.

Moral Theology

In the period we are considering, Baptists who have written at length about moral theology and social ethics include Henlee Barnette, T. B. Maston, Anna Robbins, R. E. O. White, Dallas Willard, and many others.

Some Baptists who have been influential in public life have written about moral issues. Three who have had enormous influence are AI Gore on the moral issues involved in global warming, Jimmy Carter on human rights, and Martin Luther King Jr. on civil rights and the war in Viet Nam. In terms of influence on public policy, King may have been the most influential Baptist theologian of the twentieth century.

A milestone in Baptist ethics was reached in 2003 with the publication of David Gushee and Glen Stassen's 500-page Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. They use Jesus' teaching, especially the Sermon on the Mount, as their principal criterion for making ethical judgments. This has been done in monographs written by other Baptists such as Tony Campolo (Red Letter Christians: A Citizen's Guide to Faith and Politics), but, so far as I'm aware, this is the first time it has been done in a comprehensive textbook of Christian ethics.

Pastoral Theology

In the discipline of pastoral theology also, Baptists have done important work. Even today, more than a decade after his death, Wayne Oates remains a towering figure in this field. It seems somehow fitting that Oates, who wrote fifty-seven books, should have coined the word workaholic.

The lines between these five kinds of theology sometimes get blurred. In particular, some books dealing with suffering and faith are simultaneously biblical, historical, moral, philosophical, and pastoral. This is evident in three fine books on this subject written by Warren McWilliams: The Suffering of God, When You Walk Through the Fire, and Where is the God of Justice?

Systematic Theology

Systematic theology is written in an orderly manner to commend traditional and/or original theological ideas to readers. From now on I will use the word theology to refer to systematic theology. Theology books tend to be of three kinds: introductions, textbooks, and monographs.

Introductions

By mediating between church members and the sometimes inaccessible writings of academic theologians, introductions to Christian theology contribute meaningfully to the lives of Christians who desire to understand their faith better. Out of many such books written by Baptists in the past six decades I will mention just two.

In the United States most Baptist academic theologians teach in Baptist schools. Dallas Roark is an exception in that he was teaching at Kansas State Teachers College when he wrote The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Thought. Because Roark was in a secular school it is not surprising that, in addition to chapters on the usual theological topics, he began with chapters titled "Why Believe in God?" and "Why Christianity of All Religions?" Roark made an important theological proposal in his book that the diverse biblical accounts of the meaning of Jesus' atoning work can all be expressed in terms of the new covenant.

Bruce Milne, a Scot, wrote a winsome introduction titled Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief. This book is unusual because British Baptists, unlike Baptists in the United States, tend not to write many introductions to theology. Milne has taught theology in London and served as a pastor in Vancouver. His book includes a strong apologetic component. His theology is gently Reformed. Apparently he is a well-wisher but a bystander of the charismatic movement.

Baptists have created a sub-category of introductions to theology, namely, surveys of Baptist distinctives such as freedom of conscience. In fact, a close examination reveals that Baptists share their "distinctives" with other Christians. In his book More Than Just a Name: Preserving Our Baptist Identity, R. Stanton Norman lists about twenty-five such books written in the past six decades. A splendid example is the Baptist World Alliance book titled We Baptists.

Books such as these help to provide a sense of identity for Baptists. On the other hand, they can mislead inexperienced readers into thinking that the distinctively Baptist beliefs are more important than the beliefs that Baptists hold in common with all Christians.

Textbooks

When we hear the phrase "systematic theology," we tend to think of those massive volumes that have been both loved and hated by the students who were required to study them in seminaries and divinity schools. During our period several Baptists have written large theology textbooks. I have already mentioned those by James Leo Garrett and Kenneth Cauthen. Following are seven others.

I begin with a three-volume, 1400-page book by R. T. Kendall titled Understanding Theology. It is unusual in that it consists almost exclusively of outlines. Because most of the points, sub-points, and sub-sub-points are entire sentences, it isn't difficult to follow Kendall's thinking. His career is as extraordinary as his book. He is a Southern Baptist who for twenty-five years served as pastor of Westminster Chapel in London. Like his predecessors G. Campbell Morgan and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Kendall is a master of biblical exposition, but in this systematic theology he intentionally addresses current issues also. He is charismatic and longs for a reuniting of the Word and the Spirit.

Wayne Grudem's 1300-page Systematic Theology has been abridged into a 530-page book titled Bible Doctrine that in turn has been abridged into a 160-page book titled Christian Beliefs. Grudem, like Kendall, defends both Calvinism and charismatic experience. He is a Third Wave charismatic; at one time he participated in a Vineyard Fellowship, though he is a Baptist. In this book and others he argues for a complementarian understanding of men and women. Women and men are equal in value before God, but God has assigned them different, complementary roles. Grudem is a master communicator, and his book is now being used as a text at many seminaries.

In a 1991 survey of how systematic theology is being taught in America, Gabriel Fackre discovered that Baptist Millard Erickson's Christian Theology was being used as a text in more schools than any other single-author book. There is now an abridged version of this 1300-page volume, and Erickson delights in telling people that it is popularly known as "Millard Light."

Erickson is a mediating theologian. For example, he makes a conscientious effort to do justice to both sides of a debate in which Baptists have engaged almost continually for four hundred years: the debate about predestination. He affirms divine sovereignty and human freedom, and he says that God's work of predestination is compatible with humans making free choices. I appreciate mediating theology, but I think there isn't a coherent middle ground here. Predestination is an either/or issue. If you believe that prior to creation God made a sovereign decision, without reference to the future conduct of individual human beings, to save certain individuals and not others, you are a Calvinist. If you don't believe that, you aren't.

Samuel J. Mikolaski's Theological Sentences is unusual in several ways. One is that the author brought it into print when he was ninety years old! Another is that the author employs a numerical format similar to Ludwig Wittgensteins's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The author interacts thoughtfully with a wide range of conversation partners, especially with scientists and philosophers. This book is a splendid example of how to present the good news to contemporary intellectuals.

Of the Baptist systematic theologies published during our period, perhaps the most intensely biblical is The Word of Truth by Dale Moody. I estimate there are 3,000 references to Scripture in this 600-page book, and the book is enriched by the author's utilization of the results of the work of the biblical theology movement. Moody used biblical criticism to understand the Bible. He was passionately ecumenical, and his ecumenism was wider than most theologians can manage. For example, in his chapter on eschatology he spent one page arguing with Albert Schweitzer and the next page arguing with C. I. Scofield. Moody displayed an enthusiasm for the Bible and for theology that is infectious in the way James Leo Garrett's enthusiasm for historical theology is.

Stanley Grenz wrote a 900-page systematic theology titled Theology for the Community of God. Grenz does not follow the traditional procedure of beginning his book with an affirmation of the authority of Scripture and then moving on to systematize what he finds in Scripture. His section on Scripture does not come until the middle of his book, in a chapter on the Holy Spirit in which he says that the Spirit uses the Bible to carry out the Spirit's work in the church. In not placing the Bible at the beginning of his book, Grenz was following the example of the First London Confession rather than of the Second. It was a great loss to Baptists and to the wider church when Grenz died in 2005 at the age of fifty-five.

The period under consideration saw the publication of what I believe to be the most original systematic theology ever written by a Baptist. It is the three-volume Systematic Theology by James Wm. McClendon: (1) Ethics, (2) Doctrine, and (3) Witness. It is conventional for theologians to begin with method, then present doctrines, and then tease out moral implications. McClendon reversed that sequence. What lies behind this sequence is a conviction that people are drawn into Christian communities by the way of life the communities practice. They then absorb the community's beliefs the way children absorb the language of their families of origin. Only later, as they begin to think more intentionally about the community's doctrine and ethics, do they feel the need for warrants for those beliefs. McClendon worked with life narratives as much as with abstract concepts. In doing this he is, of course, following the example of the Bible.

To the best of my knowledge, McClendon's Systematic Theology has been discussed by a wider range of persons than any other systematic theology in the past sixty years. I believe it deserves this attention and respect.

We turn now to some theological monographs that display the creativity and diversity of Baptist theology.

Monographs

A Scandalous Providence: The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God. The footnotes of this 1991 publication show that the book is the product of wide reading, but author Frank Tupper wrestles with life as much as with literature. In 1981 he and his wife Betty learned that she had cancer, and she died in 1983. Early in his book Tapper briefly describes her ordeal, and then at the end of the book he recounts conversations the two of them had in the weeks leading up to her death. For him, providence is a life-and-death issue.

Tupper writes extended theological meditations on stories about Jesus from his birth to his death and resurrection. He also reflects on the stories of contemporary persons, some famous and others not. This is narrative theology at its best, not using stories to illustrate concepts or to inspire readers, but mining them for their theological and religious meanings.

Tupper defines God's providence as "the loving care of God in relationship to creation, history, and each of our lives." His principal thesis is that God always does the best God can do, given the limitations of any situation. This doesn't mean that the universe limits God, though Tupper considers that idea. It means that God has voluntarily accepted limitations as part of creating the kind of world in which we live. Tapper doesn't attempt to describe the limitations, presumably because Christians know from their own experience the kind of things the loving God might have done if the limitations did not exist.

Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit. Clark Pinnock's 1996 book is the most beautiful theology book I have ever read. Pinnock wrote that "Theology ought to be beautiful, because its subject is so beautiful." The triune God "is not at all like Aristotle's god, thinking only about thinking. God is pure ecstasy--each Person exists in loving relationship with the other Persons, and the joyous fellowship spills over into giving life to the creature." "The Trinity is an open, inviting fellowship, and the Spirit wants the church to be the same." "When we look at salvation from the standpoint of the Spirit, we view it in relational, affective terms." "Being saved is ... like falling in love with God." Pinnock describes salvation as union with God, beatific vision, communion, and theosis, not just as acquittal in a courtroom.

Of the possibility that people who are not Christians may be saved, Pinnock wrote: "There is no way around it--we must hope that God's gift of salvation is being applied to people everywhere.... Let us not forget to hope.... We are good news people. Negativity does not become us." Pinnock takes seriously the challenge that in this hope he may be motivated by wishful thinking, but he then asks those who disagree with him to consider their own motives. Are they like Noah who resented God's mercy to Ninevah, or like the elder son who resented the welcome that his father gave when the prodigal son returned home? Pinnock concludes, "Let us never give up hope for those who have not yet believed."

Pinnock believes that the Spirit plays a cosmic role. He advocates for a Spirit Christology, but he is thinking of the Spirit, not as the divine in Jesus, but as the third person of the Trinity. He emphasizes the presence of the Spirit in the sacraments. He explains why the charismatic renewal has meant so much to him and to millions of others. He says that God's mission includes not only saving souls but also bringing peace and justice and renewing the whole world.

Participating in God. A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity. Paul Fiddes has spent his entire career at Oxford University where he is now a professor of systematic theology. In this volume published in 2000, he says that we can know God by participation but not by observation. The Trinity is a community comprising three subsistent relations, that is, relations that are real within themselves rather than created by subjects. If the Trinity were three conscious persons, that would be tritheism. There are no persons at the end of the relations; the relations are the Trinity. They are not static but are movement, like a dance, weaving in and out, permeating each other. Subsistent relations cannot be visualized, but that is appropriate since God is mystery.

God acts by persuasion, never by coercion. Fiddes thinks that persuasion is more powerful than coercion. In creating the world, God became vulnerable and invited suffering into the divine life. All three persons of the Trinity suffer, not just the Son. God forgives by suffering. This is eternally the case, but it is most evident and fully accomplished in the crucifixion of Jesus. Because the entire world is sacramental, metaphorically speaking, the world is the body of the Trinity.

Fiddes intends his book to be, as its subtitle indicates, "a pastoral doctrine of the Trinity." He hopes it will be pastorally helpful even to readers who are not convinced of his understanding of the Trinity, and in this he is successful. This is good because, so far as I am aware, no other Baptist theologian has embraced the theory that the Three Persons are subsistent relations.

Fiddes is immensely learned. He conducts the most insightful conversation with patristic and modern theology I have encountered in any monograph by a Baptist. He does the same with philosophy. For good measure, he does the same with literature. Rather than generalizing about other writers, he engages discrete ideas from particular books, one at a time. The theologians, philosophers, poets, and novelists with whom he converses are almost all major writers.

Resurrection, Discipleship, Justice: Affirming the Resurrection Today. German native Thorwald Lorenzen taught theology for several years in the Baptist seminary at Rfischlikon, Switzerland, and then moved in 1995 to Australia to serve as pastor of the Canberra Baptist Church. In his 2003 book, Lorenzen expresses his conviction that theologians are missing the point of Jesus' resurrection. Conservatives insist the resurrection was an objective event, and they use it as an apologetic to prove the truth of the Christian faith. They ignore the fact that at Easter there were no neutral observers, and they emphasize the empty tomb at the expense of the appearances of the risen Christ. On the other hand, existentialist theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann say the resurrection was an experience in the lives of the first disciples rather than an act of God in history.

In Lorenzen's view, both groups are mistaken. The resurrection was neither the resuscitation of Jesus' corpse nor an interior experience of the disciples. It was rather an act of God that created a new reality. The appearances stories are a necessary and also a sufficient ground for having faith that God raised Jesus from the dead. The empty tomb stories are probably true, but they are not necessary for that faith.

Lorenzen believes it is a mistake to found the Christian faith only on the teachings of Jesus, as many theologians today do. The proper foundation for Christian faith is that God has raised Jesus from the dead. It also is a mistake to affirm the resurrection without also affirming that the one who was raised is none other than the one who was crucified because of his passionate commitment to justice. Therefore Christian faith based on the resurrection must include a concern for justice. Justice includes care for people who are poor, enslaved, and abused, and also care for the earth. It includes the liberation of women and the ordination of women. It also includes dialogue with other religions, since the resurrection means that God's love is universal and that salvation is not given only to those with faith in Jesus. The best way to grasp the meaning of the resurrection is not by reason or even by worship, though these are helpful. The best way is by discipleship. The Anabaptists were right that one must live the way Jesus taught, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, if one is to grasp the message of Jesus and his resurrection.

Lorenzen is a pastor-theologian who has sounded a forceful call to discipleship. He is realistic about the forces of darkness and death, but the resurrection of Jesus encourages him to continue to pursue justice hopefully. Though his book contains careful and persuasive arguments, in the end its central thesis seems to be carried forward as much by witness addressed to the reader's conscience as by argument.

Untamed Hospitality: Welcoming God and Other Strangers. In this 2007 volume, Elizabeth Newman conducts a running campaign against distortions of Christian hospitality. It's not about being nice, it's not something you do as an individual, and it's not trivial. When Christians gather to worship, they participate in the triune hospitality of God and are thereby trained to practice authentic hospitality. "Hospitality is not something we accomplish but a life we are given as we grow in dependence upon God and one another."

Newman thinks that as the church enters the post-modern world, the greatest contribution it can make is simply to be the church. Christians need to see through the lies modernity tells. Liberal democracy does not seek the common good but rather frees individuals to compete and thereby to pursue their individual goals. Democracy is therefore complicit in an ontology of competition and violence. People cannot become who they were meant to be by competing and winning. Science is not the only way to know reality; faith is a way of knowing, too. Scientists have faith just as religious people do, and they are rooted in a tradition as much as religious people are. Religion is never a private matter. It is a public and political one. In all education there must be catechesis before there can be genuine debate. For Christians the goal of education must be love of the triune God. Newman says there are no easy solutions to the church's problems. She writes: "The church is not ours but God's; we are therefore free from the seduction of trying to save the church and the word."

There is a theological movement in England and elsewhere known as radical orthodoxy. Newman's message is similar in that she is urging Christians to resist the seductions of modernity, including capitalism and liberal democracy, by belonging to the hospitable community of the triune God, the church.

The Christian Imagination. Slavery and colonialism have been variously interpreted. In his 2009 book, Willie James Jennings offers a theological interpretation. Jennings teaches theology at Duke Divinity School and was formerly the academic dean there.

He says that slavery separated peoples from the families, cultures, languages, and lands that had made them peoples. Deprived of these things, they ceased to be a people. The only identity that remained for them was their bodies. That is a racial identity. Colonialism thereby constructed race. On the racial scale, white was the norm, and whites assessed all others in terms of how closely they approximated that norm. Colonialism segregated people. Slavery commodified them. Their value was understood in terms of their utility as workers.

The colonizers were Christians, and Christian theology colluded with their colonizing. It had adopted a supersessionist interpretation of Israel: that God had replaced Israel with the church rather than grafted the church onto Israel. This made Christianity susceptible to a racial understanding of people. It was an inversion of the Christian message of the incarnation of the Son of God who came as a Jew to the land of Israel.

Jennings writes: "The elimination of race is beside the point. The world has been changed, and the earth has been taken from us." Since the church can't abrogate race, the way forward is a renewal of the Christian imagination. Bearing in mind that God created place and peoples and that colonialism has replaced these with race, the church must try to imagine what real Christian community and intimacy look like.

The author carries out his work principally by narrating and interpreting the stories of four persons. Gomes de Azurara, a royal chronicler of Portugal, described a slave auction held in Lagos in August 1444. Jose de Acosta Porres was a brilliant young Jesuit missionary who arrived in Lima in April 1572. John William Colenso was a nineteenth-century Anglican missionary bishop to southern Africa who initially collaborated with colonialism but came to oppose it. Olaudah Equiano, an African born in 1745, was captured and enslaved as a youth. He became a Christian, learned about business, purchased his own liberty, and wrote a narrative of his life. In addition to these stories, Jennings engages in lengthy, running conversations with many other thinkers. This is a passionate book by a brilliant theologian about a topic that the author believes deserves more attention than it has received.

Conversations and Controversies

Since 1950 Baptists have participated in numerous theological conversations and controversies. We will mention twelve of them.

Three Options in Protestant Theology (1950s)

In 1959 Westminster Press published three books, each of which represented one of the three principal options in Protestant theology at the time: conservatism, neo-orthodoxy, and liberalism. The volume on conservatism was written by a Baptist, Edward John Carnell, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary. Titled The Case for Orthodox Theology, it included both a summary of Reformed Baptist theology and a running criticism of Fundamentalism as a cultic expression of orthodoxy. Carnell argued that the main principle for interpreting the Bible is that of justification by grace through faith. The authors of the other volumes were not Baptists, but of course there were Baptists who chose those two theological options.

Baptist Sacramentolism. In 1950 Baptists were already deeply engaged in a controversy concerning sacramentalism that is still under way. The controversy was centered in England, but two of the important early books were written by a German Baptist, Johannes Schneider, dean of the theology faculty at the University of Berlin.

Until the twentieth century most Baptist writing about baptism was a defense of restricting the candidates for baptism to believers and of restricting the mode of baptism to immersion. Understandably this could lead to neglect of the theological meaning of baptism. It is not surprising, therefore, that today many Baptists assume that their church membership commits them to a memorialist-only understanding of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

The sacramentalism controversy was intensified by the fact that in ecumenical circles many non-Baptists, including Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, were expressing appreciation for the Baptist affirmation of believer's baptism. (Recently the Methodist theologian Geoffrey Wainwright expressed this controversy by saying, "The Baptists have won.") The sacramentalism controversy was carried forward by the scholarly writing of several Baptists who endorsed a sacramental understanding of baptism and the Lord's Supper. An outstanding example is George Beasley-Murray's 1962 book Baptism in the New Testament.

Baptist sacramentalists such as Beasley-Murray affirm that Christ is present in baptism and the Lord's Supper. They affirm that Christ uses these rites to give grace to participants. They understand grace, not as a mystical, spiritual substance, but as the presence and help of the loving God. They do not think the church controls or dispenses grace. God gives God's loving presence through the sacraments. In that sense the sacraments are means of grace.

Baptists find it easier to affirm this way of thinking about the Lord's Supper than about baptism. They know that the Lord uses many means to help them in their lives as Christians, so it isn't difficult to think of the Lord's Supper as one of those. But whereas the Lord's Supper speaks of help for a continuing life with Christ, baptism speaks of a single, initial, saving encounter with Christ. Can baptism have a role to play in that encounter?

Many Baptists in America find it difficult to answer this question affirmatively, one reason being that since the nineteenth century the American discussion of baptism has been heavily influenced by controversy with the Churches of Christ who insist that baptism is essential for salvation. This seems to leave just two alternatives. Either baptism is essential for salvation, or it isn't. In Great Britain it was easier for Baptists to recognize that there is a third alternative, namely, that baptism is a means God ordinarily uses to effect salvation. It isn't essential for salvation; God is free to save unbaptized persons. But neither is baptism divorced from the conversion experience.

This was the view of Beasley-Murray. What led him to this view is not that he was a crypto-Catholic or a liberal. He was neither. He affirmed a sacramental understanding of baptism because of passages in the New Testament such as Romans 6. Baptist sacramentalism has continued to develop since his epochal book.

An especially important step was taken by Paul Fiddes in an article titled "Ex Opere Operato: Re-thinking a Historic Baptist Rejection" published in a collection of essays, Baptist Sacrarnentalism 2. Fiddes affirmed the ancient principle that the gift of sacramental grace does not depend on the character of those who participate in the sacraments but only on "the performance of the act" (ex opere operato) itself. He said that this does not mean the faith of recipients is irrelevant. It does mean that it is because of the performance of the act, not because of the faith or sincerity or character of the participants in the act, that Christ comes with grace to help. Fiddes points out that Baptists "have held a virtually ex opere operato view of Christian proclamation." They believe God's Word will not return unto God void. Ex opere operato does not involve presuming on God's presence. It is no more presumptuous to trust that God is present and active in the sacraments than to trust that God keeps God's other promises. Of course, Baptists resist the ancient churches' claims that it is only when the rites are performed by their properly authorized clergy that Christ is present and active.

In my judgment, Schneider, Beasley-Murray, Fiddes, and other Baptist sacramentalists have shown that a carefully nuanced sacramental understanding of the two ordinances is biblical and that it was not unknown to earlier Baptists.

Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Renewal. Demographer David Barrett estimates that there are more than 600 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians in the word today. The Pentecostal movement that emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century has experienced numerical growth at a pace unparalleled in any other religious movement in world history.

For the first half of the twentieth century the Pentecostal movement tended to exist either in holiness churches that accepted its message or in new denominations. In the 1950s it moved out into virtually all churches where it is often called the charismatic renewal. In the 1970s a third wave of expansion began with the work of John Wimber and others. The third wave differs from the two earlier phases in that its leaders do not believe everyone who experiences baptism in the Spirit will speak in tongues.

In Baptist life the third wave seems to have been the most influential. What spoke to Baptists was not so much theological writing, such as Clark Pinnock's Flame of Love, as it was the introduction of charismatic practices into Baptist life. The practices include speaking in tongues, healing, and performing exorcisms, and worship practices such as raising hands, clapping, and singing praise songs.

Ecumenism. Like Pentecostalism, the modern ecumenical movement originated among Protestants in the first decade of the twentieth century. The ecumenical movement has led many Baptist theologians to affirm that a visible unity of Christians is necessary to the Christian mission.

In Baptist life three excellent books display the impulse toward visible unity. In 1966 William Estep wrote a book titled Baptists and Christian Unity in which he carefully described movements for Christian unity but then expressed serious reservations about some of them. His book differs noticeably from two recent books written by Steve Harmon, Towards a Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision and Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity, in which the author urges his readers to carry forward the quest for a visible unity of all Christians.

The Death of God Theology (1960s)

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of perhaps the most radical theological movement in the history of the church: the death of God movement. One of the principal thinkers of the movement was an American Baptist, William Hamilton, who was the co-author with Thomas Altizer of a 1966 book titled Radical Theology and the Death of God. When these authors said God is dead, they did not mean only that many modern people find it difficult to believe in God. Everyone already knew that. They actually meant that there is no longer a transcendent, personal, creator God.

Yet Hamilton continued to think of himself as a Christian. He was committed to trying to live the way of life that Jesus had taught even though he no longer shared Jesus' belief in God. He famously said, "We needed to redefine Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God."

Many people associate Baptist Harvey Cox's 1965 book The Secular City with the death of God movement, but the association seems to owe more to the book's title than to its content. If Cox intended to affirm the secularism hypothesis--that people invariably become less religious as they become more modern--he was mistaken. But The Secular City can be read as an account of the Christian church in the West losing the cultural hegemony it had enjoyed for centuries. Cox argued persuasively that Christians should welcome rather than resist many aspects of the resulting secularity.

The Theology of Hope (1960s)

The 1960s also saw the emergence in Europe of a new emphasis in theology: the theology of hope. The principal author, Jurgen Moltmann, was not a Baptist, but many Baptist theologians recognized the truth of his argument that theologians had been less attentive to hope than to faith and love. Moltmann may have helped some Baptist theologians who previously had embraced C. H. Dodd's realized eschatology to recognize that the Christian message has something to say about the future.

Of course, all Baptist theologians had not neglected the future. One has only to mention the name of G. E. Ladd to know how serious some Baptist theologians had been about that subject.

The Christology Controversy in the Baptist Union (1970s)

In the 1970s British Baptists experienced a brief but intense controversy concerning the person of Christ. In 1971 Michael Taylor, principal of Northern Baptist College, read a paper titled "How Much of a Man Was Jesus Christ?" at the general assembly of the Baptist Union. Many British Baptists were alarmed by what they felt was Taylor's deficient understanding of Christ. Taylor himself did not participate in the ensuing controversy, but in 1972 the Baptist Union affirmed a more traditional view of Christ than Taylor seemed to have affirmed. The controversy seems to have been conducted with maximal courtesy and minimal ecclesiastical politicking.

The Inerrancy Controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention (1980s)

"Maximal courtesy and minimal ecclesiastical politicking" cannot be said of the controversy over biblical inerrancy that Southern Baptists experienced in the 1980s, however. The outcomes of that controversy in the world's largest Baptist body include that the Southern Baptist Convention is now officially committed to biblical inerrancy and that the agencies of the Convention are being taken in new directions by new leaders.

During the controversy the original leaders sometimes argued that the issues were political rather than theological, but this seems to me not to have been an either/or matter. The issues were political, but they also were theological.

The church has always affirmed that the great message of the Bible is true. The defense of the truth of Scripture by means of an appeal to the original manuscripts of the Bible is a modern innovation that gained traction at Princeton Theological Seminary in the nineteenth century and then moved into the wider church through the Fundamentalist coalition of the early twentieth century. The best defense of the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible ever written may be Clark Pinnock's Biblical Revelation: The Foundation of Christian Theology published by Moody Press in 1971. A decade later Pinnock presented a much more irenic view in The Scripture Principle (1984).

During the Southern Baptist controversy the old leaders affirmed that the great message of the Bible is true, but the new leaders argued that this affirmation was inadequate, and they called for an affirmation of the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible. Tom Nettles and Russ Bush wrote a book titled Baptists and the Bible in which they argued that the majority of Baptists had always been committed to biblical inerrancy. In fact, of course, most Baptists have believed in the message of the translations they read, not in the original manuscripts. The new leaders' appeal to the original manuscripts is visible in a well-written and winsome 1991 denominational study book by David Dockery titled The Doctrine of the Bible.

Despite the message of these and other books, the transformation of the Convention was carried out principally by political actions rather than by theological writing.

The Resurgence of Calvinism (1990s)

Except for the first quarter-century of their 400-year history, Baptists have debated predestination continually. Different Baptist bodies have arisen as a result. The Primitive Baptists are Calvinistic, the Free Will Baptists are Arminian, and many other Baptist bodies are in the middle.

I mentioned earlier my conviction that a mediating view is incoherent. That conviction is shared by many of those who have led a resurgence of Calvinism that began to occur late in the twentieth century. Those leaders include able, influential Baptist pastor-theologians such as John MacArthur and John Piper. Their theological opponents include other pastor-theologians such as Herschel Hobbs and Greg Boyd.

An academic theologian who is forcefully resisting the resurgence is Roger Olson of Truett Seminary. He has written two books on this subject: Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities and Against Calvinism. Olson is one of the most insightful and productive contemporary Baptist theologians and ethicists.

Another academic theologian who effectively resisted Calvinism is Leroy Forlines who taught at the Free Will Baptist Bible College in Nashville for a stunning fifty-seven years. He is the author of a large systematic theology titled The Quest for Truth: Theology for a Postmodern World. The parts of that book that are relevant to this controversy have been collected and published with the title Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation.

Southern Baptist Calvinists have an effective organization called the Founders Ministries. In the 1990s Calvinism made progress in the Convention because some of the leaders chosen in the wake of the inerrancy controversy were Calvinists. Most of the men--and they were all men--who came into leadership roles as a result of that controversy were not Calvinists, but they did not exclude Calvinists from leadership roles in the Convention. In June 2013 the Convention adopted a statement that outlines an accord between Calvinists and non-Calvinists.

Open Theism (1990s)

Another controversy that erupted in the 1990s concerned open theism. The controversy was centered in the Evangelical Theological Society in the United States. Baptists participated on both sides of this controversy. One of the most articulate open theists is Greg Boyd, the founding pastor of a Baptist General Conference mega-church in St. Paul who for sixteen years served also as a professor at his denomination's Bethel College. One of the most articulate opponents of open theism is John Piper, who is pastor of another Baptist General Conference mega-church in neighboring Minneapolis and who also has taught at Bethel. In 2000 the Southern Baptist Convention issued a revision of its Baptist Faith and Message that, among other changes, explicitly rejected open theism.

Open theism differs from classical Christian theism on the subject of God's attributes. Open theists think that the church derived some of its understanding of God's attributes from Hellenistic philosophy rather than from the Bible. While they don't reject all philosophical ideas, they do say that the putative attributes of God that are incompatible with biblical teaching should be dropped.

The most contested attribute is omniscience. The classical view is that God knows everything without qualification. Open theists affirm that God knows everything there is to be known, but then they add that some things that do not yet exist are not available to be known, even by God. In particular, future free decisions of humans do not yet exist, and therefore God does not know them. God knows the probabilities of their being made, God knows them as soon as they are made, God understands them better than those who make them, and God deals resourcefully with them, but until they are made, God knows them only as possibilities, not as actualities.

Open theists are theological conservatives. Their principal argument is scriptural. For example, after Abraham shows that he is prepared to sacrifice Isaac and God stops him from doing so, the Lord says: "Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me" (Gen. 22:12). Open theists argue that the natural reading of the passage is that God tested Abraham and thereby learned that Abraham really feared God.

The revisions proposed by open theists amount to a new understanding of God, a fact that its supporters acknowledge. They believe that Protestants especially should understand that sometimes the church's traditions need to be reformed in the light of Scripture. Clark Pinnock, an open theist, admits that he does not know whether open theism will prevail, or be forgotten, or continue to be debated, or whether the church will simply remain divided over some of the issues open theists have raised.

Relationships among the Three Persons of the Trinity (1990s)

Open theism originated among conservative evangelicals, many of whom were members of the Evangelical Theological Society. The same is true of a controversy concerning relationships among the three persons of the Trinity. Some of the principal participants in this controversy have been Baptists.

Theologians on both sides of this debate reject Arianism and affirm that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all equally divine. They reject tritheism and affirm that there is only one God. They reject modalism and affirm that the Father, Son, and Spirit are persons.

The issue about which they disagree is whether or not the Son of God and the Spirit of God are eternally subordinate to the Father. Wayne Grudem, for example, says they are. In his Systematic Theology he crafts a careful phrase to describe his view: the Son and Spirit are "equal in being but subordinate in role." He argues: "If the Son is not eternally subordinate to the Father in role, then the Father is not eternally 'Father' and the Son is not eternally 'Son.' This would mean that the Trinity has not eternally existed." He writes: "Though all three members of the Trinity are equal in power and in all other attributes, the Father has a greater authority. He has a leadership role among all the members of the Trinity that the Son and Holy Spirit do not have."

Participants on both sides of this debate recognize that what is being said about the Trinity has implications for the relationships of women and men. Are those roles complementarian (men have God-given authority over women), or are they egalitarian?

In 2009 Baptist Millard Erickson wrote a monograph about this controversy. In this book, Who's Tampering with the Trinity?: An Assessment of the Subordination Debate, Erickson surveys the current state of the controversy. In the last chapter, "So Who's Right?" he finds for the egalitarian view. He thinks that, even though the participants on both sides are orthodox Christians, the complementarian view is unstable and "contains dements that logically imply an unorthodox dimension of the doctrine of the Trinity." He wonders how long the complementarians can continue to hold their view without resolving its inconsistency. His message to complementarians is: "Go back. You are going the wrong way."

Re-envisioning the Baptist Identity (1990s)

The final controversy I want to mention centers around a 4000-word document titled "Re-envisioning the Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America." Created by American theologians, the Manifesto was published in Perspectives in Religious Studies in 1997 and has been disseminated widely, discussed in many venues, and written about in various journals.

I will summarize two examples of that writing. The first is an article by Curtis Freeman published in 1997 and titled "Can Baptist Theology Be Revisioned?" Freeman argued that "the definition of Baptist theology in terms of libertarian notions of autonomy is a modern account." He said that this account ties Baptists too tightly to modernity. He believes that modernity is dying, and he wants Baptists to sever their ties with modernity. Baptists in the southern United States should dissociate from the cultural hegemony they have experienced in the past. They should dissociate from the Enlightenment's "foundationalist theory of knowledge which requires all beliefs to be justified by a special class of beliefs that cannot be questioned." Fundamentalists are foundationalists inasmuch as they appeal to an inerrant Bible as the foundation for their beliefs. Liberals also are foundationalists inasmuch as they appeal to religious experience as the foundation for their beliefs. He writes: "Conservatives and liberals (as well as evangelicals and moderates) are really twin trajectories of modern theology." None of these options has "resources to develop a Baptist theology for the next millennium." Baptists should say farewell to modernity so they can live faithfully in an increasingly post-modern world.

Freeman extolls the freedom that Christ gives. He is troubled when fellow Baptists embrace any freedom that is established by government or stated in terms of human rights. He worries that appreciation for freedom in this sense can lead to idolatry with the state as god. He disapproves of theology that was "less a way of giving warrants for communally held convictions and historically preserved practices as it became more a discourse of classifying and arranging the facts of the Bible." The proper role of doctrine is to render intelligible the communal life of the church. Baptist theologians who already have taken steps in this direction include Stanley Grenz, Barry Harvey, Harvey Cox, W. T. Connor, and especially James Wm. McClendon.

The second article was published a year later, also in Perspectives. Written by Walter Shurden and titled "The Baptist Identity and the Baptist Manifesto," it is a response to the Manifesto--not to Freeman's article. Shurden's intention is to share some sincere appreciations, to voice some serious reservations, and to ask some honest questions.

Two of Shurden's appreciations are that the Manifesto affirms the disestablishment of the church and that it issues a forceful call to serious discipleship. Two of his reservations are that it makes its case for the importance of Christian community at the expense of an appreciation for the individual, and it makes its case for the spiritual freedom that Christ gives to Christians at the expense of the freedom that God gives to all human beings in creation and for which societies and nations express respect by means of political freedom and human rights. Shurden asks these questions: To what community is the Manifesto referring when it speaks of "the community's legitimate authority"? "Are you serious or are you just pulling our Baptist legs" when you write in the Manifesto that you "reject every form of private interpretation that makes Bible reading a practice that can be carried out according to the dictates of individual conscience"?

Shurden displays in some detail some Baptist writings about what he calls three Baptist genes: individualism, community, and freedom. All three, he says, are part of Baptist identity.

The controversy surrounding the Manifesto, like the sacramentalism controversy, has generated splendid theological work.

Possibilities for the Coming Decades

1. The content of Baptist theology will remain diverse. Baptists are today, as they were in 1972 when Walter Shurden's book was first published, "Not a Silent People."

2. Baptist theologians will be writing more theology. They are writing more now than they were sixty years ago.

3. Baptists will continue to make creative proposals in theology. There weren't many of those in 1950, but they are evident in the recent work of Paul Fiddes, Mark Helm, Elizabeth Newman, and Clark Pinnock, among others.

4. Baptist women will be writing more theology. It's difficult to think of Baptist women who were writing theology in 1950. Today there are many including Sheri Adams, Sharon Baker, and Molly Marshall.

5. More than in the past, Baptists will write theology in languages other than English. The Baptist World Alliance continues to be a catalyst for this effort.

6. Baptist theologians will continue to treat the Bible as in some sense authoritative for their theology.

7. Baptist theologians will continue to engage historical theology in more sophisticated ways.

8. Baptist theologians will engage in conversations with other religions more than in the past.

9. Baptist systematic theologians will incorporate social ethics into their work more than in the past.

10. Baptist theologians will continue to advocate for causes, especially for causes related to injustices arising from issues of gender, race, class, ecology, and war.

11. Baptist theologians will continue to wrestle with standing issues of modernity such as science and human rights.

12. Baptist theologians will increasingly embrace a sacramental understanding of baptism and the Lord's Supper.

13. Baptist theologians will continue to write about the Trinity.

14. Baptist theologians will continue to debate issues that for them have remained unresolved, the principal one of which is Calvinism and Arminianism.

15. Baptist theologians will continue to debate issues that emerge from new movements such as Pentecostalism and ecumenism.

16. It seems unlikely that Baptists will develop schools of thought around individual theologians. Continental theologians famously do this, and British theologians famously don't. In the past six decades this might have happened with Baptist theologians such as Harvey Cox, Langdon Gilkey, Millard Erickson, Clark Pinnock, or Paul Fiddes, but it didn't. On the other hand, it did happen with James Wm. McClendon--but in a limited way.

We may hope that in the future Baptists may benefit even more than they have in the past from the work of their theologians. If they do, then Baptist theology should flourish, because ecclesiastical groups tend to get the kinds of leaders they value, and that includes theologians.

In order not to exceed the word count the editor has generously allowed for this essay, I have omitted most bibliographical references and information about several books that were helpfully called to my attention when I spoke on this subject to the Baptist History & Heritage Society annual conference in 2012.

Fisher Humphreys is professor of divinity, emeritus, of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.