Theological variety in the Baptist experience: in his foreword to Bruce T. Gourley's The Godmakers, Walter Shurden wrote: "the making of history books without a point of view has no end." (1) The point of view from which this article is being written is that of a Southern Baptist in the second half of the twentieth century.

Humphreys, Fisher

Readers of this journal are aware of the fact that beginning in 1979 the Southern Baptist Convention was convulsed by a controversy that resulted in the resignation or firing of numerous professors, missionaries, and heads of agencies. In addition to the tragic toll that it exacted on the lives and careers of many fine persons, the controversy has altered the theological orientation of the agencies of the convention, and we may expect that the vision of the new leaders will eventually reach many of the people in the 42,000 churches in the convention.

I hope to identify the theological heritage that Southern Baptists received prior to the controversy, as a way of displaying the theologically variety of the Baptist experience. (2)

This article comprises two parts. In-the first, I will describe the theology held by the majority of Southern Baptists up until 1979. The majority tradition includes four clusters of beliefs: the beliefs that Baptists hold in common with all Christians; those they hold in common with other Protestant Christians: those they hold in common with other Baptists; and those they hold in common with other Christians who have been influenced by revivalism. The sequence is chronological; the beliefs in the first cluster were held before the Reformation, those in the second cluster come from the sixteenth century, those in the third cluster come from the seventeenth century, and those in the fourth cluster come from the eighteenth century.

In the second part of the article, I will describe seven clusters of beliefs held by minority groups in Southern Baptist life prior to the controversy. These also are in chronological order. From the sixteenth century there are Anabaptist beliefs and Calvinistic beliefs; from the nineteenth century there are Landmark Baptist beliefs and deeper life beliefs; and from the twentieth century there are fundamentalist beliefs, Pentecostal beliefs, and progressive beliefs.

The theological variety of the Baptist experience will be evident in the first part to the extent that one recognizes that beneath the consensus on beliefs such as "God created the world" there is a variety of interpretation such as, for example, whether or not life on earth has evolved. The theological variety of the Baptist experience will be obvious in the second part because each of the seven clusters of beliefs comprises ideas held by some, but not all, Baptists.

The Majority Tradition: Beliefs Baptists Share with All Christians

Of the approximately six billion people on earth, slightly more than two billion are members of Christian churches. With occasional and statistically trivial exceptions, these churches are committed to a number of beliefs, and Baptists share those beliefs. It is natural to assume that beliefs held by churches as diverse as the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches of the East, the various Protestant churches, and the indigenous churches that are now growing so rapidly in some parts of the world would be trivial beliefs.

In my judgment, the opposite is the case. The beliefs that Baptists share with all other Christians are in fact some of the most important beliefs that they hold. They include the following:

* There is one and only one true and living God. While this may seem self-evident today, it was not self-evident when Israel began to grasp it many centuries ago.

* God is the creator of the entire universe.

* The world has fallen into sin. One of the great achievements of the Jewish and Christian faiths has been to hold both of these beliefs together, for they contain a paradox: The world is good (the good God made it), and the world is evil (human beings have disobeyed God).

* In some mysterious way the one true God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

* The Father sent the Son into the world to provide salvation for the world. Jesus was born of Mary, a virgin, and as an adult carried out a brief public ministry that included healing, exorcisms, teaching, preaching, and gathering together the nucleus of a new faith community.

* Jesus died and rose again the third day to take away the sins of the world. This is the central message of the Christian faith.

* At Pentecost, the Father poured out the Holy Spirit on Jesus' disciples, thereby creating a new faith community, the church.

* The Spirit guides and empowers the church on a mission to the world.

* The church carries out its work by word and sacrament, that is, by proclaiming the good news about what God has done in Christ and by receiving new members through the rite of baptism and nurturing them through the rite of communion; baptism and communion give a nonverbal witness to Jesus' death and resurrection.

* God will complete this wonderful work in the future.

* Finally, the Bible tells this wonderful story and therefore is the church's holy book.

These beliefs are very securely established among Baptists today.

The Majority Tradition: Beliefs Baptists Share with Protestant Christians

Drawing on biblical metaphors for the church such as bride of Christ and body of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church initially resisted the reforming work of Martin Luther and others. One of the mottos of the Reformation was ecclesia semper reformanda, the church must always be undergoing reform. Baptists share that Protestant belief.

One of the questions that Roman Catholics had about reforming the church was, "By what standard?" The Protestant reformers answered with a second motto, sola Scripture. The Bible alone is the written Word of God, and it is the standard by which the faith and life of the church must be measured and reformed.

A third Protestant belief also is expressed by Latin mottos, sola gratia and sola fide, grace alone and faith alone. Martin Luther learned in the depths of his own experience that a person does not earn a right standing before God by doing good works; right standing with God is a gift of God's grace and is received by faith alone.

A fourth Protestant belief is that persons who put their faith in God will never fall away from salvation but will be held by God.

A fifth Protestant belief is that all Christians are priests before God. Luther employed the biblical image of the priesthood of believers to support the freedom of Christians from what he thought to be the tyranny of the Roman Catholic priesthood. This was a new usage for the metaphor of priesthood; in the Bible, priesthood is employed to speak of believers' privileges and responsibilities but not of their freedoms.

Today the majority of Baptists accept the first four Protestant beliefs, but the fifth is controversial.

The Majority Tradition: Beliefs Which Are Unique to Baptists

When the Baptist movement emerged from English Separatism early in the seventeenth century, it bore some distinctive beliefs. One was that baptism should be reserved for believers. In the winter of 1608-09, John Smyth baptized first himself and then the members of his little congregation of English exiles living in Amsterdam. He did so by pouring water. About 1640, Baptists began to insist that the proper form of baptism was immersion; (3) this was a second belief that was peculiar to Baptists.

The practice of restricting baptism to believers led to a believers' church. The retrieval of a believers' church may be Baptists' greatest contribution to the larger church.

Fourth, Baptists believed that each of their little congregations should be self-governing, and, fifth, they believed that each member of a congregation should share in the decision-making of the congregation. Sixth, they also believed that the congregations should work cooperatively with each other. The early Baptists inherited these three beliefs from their predecessors, the Congregationalists.

Seventh, Baptists believed that in a religiously pluralistic society the way to grant maximal religious liberty for all citizens is to effect a separation between church and state. The separation of church and state is the principal contribution of Baptists to society at large.

Eighth and finally, Baptists have no creed but the Bible. Some Baptists have distinguished carefully between prescriptive creeds and descriptive confessions, cheerfully resisting the one while employing the other. The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention referred to the "Baptist aversion to all creeds but the Bible." (4)

Three of these Baptist beliefs are at risk in the new Southern Baptist Convention. Some of the new Baptist leaders resist congregational decision-making in favor of the authority of pastors, the line of separation between church and state is being moved by the new leaders of the convention, and some of the new leaders are not averse to creeds.

The Majority Tradition: Beliefs Baptists Share with Revivalist Christians

In the fourth decade of the eighteenth century, the revivalist movement began more or less simultaneously in America under the leadership of Jonathan Edwards and in England under the leadership of John Wesley and George Whitefield. One distinctive belief of the revivalist movement was that all persons, even those who were baptized as infants, must be converted in order to become Christians.

A second revivalist belief is that persons who have been converted may have a full assurance of their salvation. Wesley described his own experience at Aldersgate as follows: "I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." (5) In revivalism, a personal assurance of salvation is normative for all Christians.

A third belief associated with revivalism is the conviction that evangelism is a principal task of the church, even in reportedly Christian nations and among people who have been church members since infancy.

A fourth belief is closely associated with the third, namely, that missions is a primary task of the church. The Reformation of the sixteenth century did not produce a great missionary movement, nor did the birth of. Baptist churches in the seventeenth. It was the revivalist movement of the eighteenth century that generated the modern missionary movement.

All four of these beliefs are secure in the life of Baptists today. Many Baptists regard conversion and assurance as indispensable to true Christian faith, and the Southern Baptist Convention came into existence in 1845, in order to create "a plan for eliciting, combining and directing the energies of the whole denomination in one sacred effort, for the propagation of the Gospel." (6)

Now, we will turn our attention to seven clusters of beliefs that are held by minority groups in the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Minority Traditions: Anabaptist Beliefs

Since the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century were viewed with contempt by both the Roman Catholic Church and the magisterial reformers such as Luther and Calvin, it is hardly surprising that they withdrew from society. Today, a few Baptists believe that true Christians must withdraw from society to be faithful to their calling.

A second belief with origins in the Anabaptist movement is pacifism. The great majority of Christians have held to just-war theory which says that there are situations in which it is better to go to war than not. Across the centuries some Christians have, however, rejected just war and embraced one of two other views. One is holy war in which war is regarded as a positive good. The other is pacifism, in which it is held that Christians must not go to war under any circumstances. Many of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century were pacifists, and some Baptists today hold that view.

A third belief associated with Anabaptists is that Christians should share their possessions communally. A few Baptists have embraced this view.

None of the Anabaptist beliefs is likely to become dominant in the life of Southern Baptists in the foreseeable future.

The Minority Traditions: Calvinistic Beliefs

Calvinism is the vision of the Christian faith articulated by John Calvin, a second-generation reformer and a brilliant theologian. More specifically, Calvinism is Calvin's view of God's sovereignty as all-controlling and of God's predestining of some but not all persons to salvation.

A famous presentation of Calvinism is an acronym which comes from the Synod of Dort which met in the Netherlands in 1618-19. It is TULIP: total depravity (people are spiritually dead and so unable to respond to the gospel), unconditional election (God elects some persons to be saved, without reference to God's foreknowledge of the behavior of those persons), limited atonement (God intended that Christ's sacrifice would benefit only the elect; later this belief was understood to mean that Christ's sacrifice was limited in what it achieved), irresistible grace (the elect, who are spiritually dead, cannot resist the work of God's grace by which they are born again), and the perseverance of Christians, a belief which is held by the majority of Baptists.

In fact, the sequence of beliefs is not logical, nor was this the sequence at Dort; the sequence is ULTIP. The first point might be better be called "unconditional predestination" since it concerns both the elect and the reprobate. From unconditional predestination the other four views flow naturally.

Calvinism is currently enjoying a resurgence in Baptist life. Southern Baptists who are Calvinists have an effective organization called "Founders Ministries," and the president of the oldest Southern Baptist seminary is a committed Calvinist. Baptists who are Calvinists have more reason to be optimistic about the future now than they have had in the past century.

Still, Calvinism remains a minority view among Baptists, and many Baptists are profoundly suspicious of it. Some believe that Calvinism denies human freedom. Others think that it is inconsistent to say that God loves people but does not elect them to be saved. A great many believe that Calvinism undermines Baptists' deep commitment to missions and evangelism. Naturally Calvinists have responses to these suspicions, but overcoming these suspicions will not be an easy task.

The Minority Traditions: Landmark Baptist Beliefs

The Landmark movement was born among Baptists in America in the nineteenth century. Landmark Baptists reasoned that, if believer's baptism is the only biblical form of baptism, then the so-called churches who baptize babies are not churches at all. The Landmark leaders therefore called Baptists to separate themselves from Methodists and Presbyterians and all others who baptized infants.

They also called Baptist churches to limit their cooperation with each other. Their justification for this was that the only ecclesial bodies mentioned in the New Testament are local congregations; since the New Testament churches did not create mission boards and publication societies, neither should Baptists today. One expression of limited cooperation among churches was that only members of a local congregation should join in the Lord's Supper; visitors from other congregations should wait until they are back home to take the Lord's Supper.

The influence of the Landmark movement on contemporary Baptists is great. For example, when the founders of the convention met in Augusta in 1845, they observed the Lord's Supper together; today, as a result of the Landmark influence, messengers to the convention never take the Lord's Supper.

Only a minority of Baptists today follow all of the counsel of Landmark Baptists. The two great mission boards and the publication board are firmly established in Baptist life today, and the convention has invited non-Baptists such as Franky Schaeffer and James Dobson to speak at the annual meetings.

It seems likely that the present situation will continue; the influence of the Landmark movement will remain, but there will be no resurgence of interest in the Landmark beliefs themselves.

The Minority Traditions: Deeper Life Beliefs

The deeper life movement, like the revivalist movement, seems to have arisen simultaneously in America and England. The movement embodied four distinctive beliefs about Christian life. One is that there is a secret to living a happy, productive Christian life. Many conscientious Christians attempt to live faithfully but fail because they do not know that secret.

The secret is that Christians must cease striving to live faithfully and begin instead to depend upon God. This is the second belief.

The third belief is that when Christians cease striving and begin depending, God will begin to work through them. God's work in Christians does not really begin in earnest until Christians begin to depend in earnest.

The final belief is that when Christians begin to depend upon God, they. will live lives that are victorious, fulfilling, and happy.

The status of these beliefs among Baptists is curious. Many Baptists have never heard of any of them and when they do hear about them, find them baffling. On the other hand, for many Baptists this is the only authentic understanding, of Christian living; they think that Christians who do not hold these beliefs are spiritually benighted.

Strangely, there is no controversy among Baptists regarding these beliefs. It is difficult to know how to account for this and difficult to know how to appraise the future of these beliefs. Some of the new leaders of the convention hold these beliefs, but others do not. Perhaps the present state of affairs will continue, with some Baptists embracing these beliefs enthusiastically and others unaware of them or puzzled by them.

The Minority Traditions: Fundamentalist Beliefs

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the various Protestant churches in America spent a great deal of time and energy arguing with each other about which was the true, New Testament church. During that same period, liberal Protestant theology was born and gained a greater and greater hearing until, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many in the major Protestant churches found it threatening; it was almost always understood to be the thin edge of the wedge of secularism and unbelief. As a result, individuals and groups from within the major Protestant churches set aside their differences on other matters and united to form a common front against their common enemy, liberalism. Curtis Lee Laws, a Baptist and a member of this loose coalition of traditional Protestants, referred to his cobelligerents as "fundamentalists," and the name has stuck.

Today, the word has decidedly pejorative overtones, and its meaning has become so amorphous that one routinely reads of, for example, Muslim fundamentalists. In this article I am not using the word pejoratively and intend only to identify the American Protestants who first formed a coalition to defeat liberalism.

Not surprisingly, one important belief of this group was that true Christians should oppose liberalism, and they should do so militantly. In order to be a fundamentalist one must not only believe and preach the fundamentals of the faith; one must militantly defend them, especially against liberalism.

A second belief of the original fundamentalists concerned separation. One expression of opposition to liberalism was to separate from churches and denominations which failed to censure liberalism. Fundamentalists have discussed carefully the distinction between primary separation--from liberals, for example--and secondary separation, from those who, though fundamentalists themselves, have failed to separate from liberals.

A third belief of the original fundamentalists was that the original manuscripts of the Bible contained no errors of any kind. We have seen that all Christians regard the Bible as their holy book, that Protestants insist that the Bible has priority over the teachings of the church, and that Baptists have no creed except the Bible. Fundamentalism adds a fourth understanding of the Bible to these, namely, that the original manuscripts of the Bible were inerrant.

A fourth belief of the original fundamentalists concerned the millennium. Christians have traditionally spoken about the future in terms of the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment, heaven, and hell. To these topics the fundamentalists added the millennium; in the near future, Jesus will return to earth and will rule the earth for a thousand years.

These beliefs are held today by a large minority of Baptists, and some may be held by a majority. The new leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention understood their initiatives in the controversy which began in 1979 as a militant defense of the fundamentals of the Christian faith against liberal theology, and they understood their campaign to rid the seminaries and other agencies of liberals as an act of primary separation. They made the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible the principal issue in that controversy. Though they are more flexible about the millennium than some of the original fundamentalists were, apparently most of the new leaders are committed to some version of pre-millennial eschatology.

The Minority Traditions: Pentecostal Beliefs

Across the centuries many Christians have experienced ecstatic experiences, but not until the twentieth century did anyone propose that a particular ecstatic experience is normative for all Christians. That proposal was made by persons who had been nurtured in the Wesleyan holiness tradition in the United States.

For several decades, holiness Christians had been arguing that it was possible for Christians to experience the perfection of which John Wesley spoke by having a single experience of sanctification subsequent to the experience of conversion. Beginning in a revival meeting in Los Angeles in April 1906, W. J. Seymour, a holiness preacher, proclaimed that everyone who is sanctified will be given the gift of speaking in tongues as a supernatural confirmation. This led to the Azusa Street Mission, a series of revival services that continued daily for three years. Pentecostalism was born in the Azusa Street Mission.

For about half a century, Pentecostalism was confined to newly formed Pentecostal churches and to holiness churches which accepted the message (some rejected it). However, beginning in the 1950s, Pentecostalism moved into virtually all churches, and the charismatic movement was born.

At this point some Baptists became convinced by the charismatic message. They remain a minority in Baptist life, and there is no reason to suppose that this will change in the near future. However, the influence of the charismatic movement in Baptist life extends beyond those persons who have embraced Pentecostal beliefs. That influence is apparent in the style of worship services now practiced in many Baptist churches.

The Minority Traditions: Progressive Beliefs

Progressive beliefs are different than the other minority beliefs in this way: while the others are clusters of interrelated beliefs which people accept or reject as a group, progressive beliefs are discrete beliefs which people accept or reject seriatim.

One of the progressive beliefs is that women may be ordained and serve as pastors. This has been embraced by a minority of Baptists. Since ordination takes place at the prerogative of congregations with no necessary input from other congregations or from associations or conventions, it has been possible for congregations to take this step even though their neighboring congregations disapproved. Occasionally, associations or conventions have expelled from their membership congregations that have taken this step, and the revised version of the Baptist Faith and Message adopted by the Convention in 2000 explicitly disallows women serving as pastors: "The office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." (7)

A second progressive belief is that the Bible should be studied critically. Critical study is an essentially contested concept. R. G. Collingwood has proposed that the study of any subject becomes critical when students begin to formulate their own questions and then use the data--in this case, the Bible--to try to answer their questions. (8) Understood in this way, the critical study of the Bible is accepted by some Baptists but rejected by most. Among the objections to it are that it is not the only way to study the Bible and that those who have studied the Bible critically have often arrived at incorrect conclusions. Both of these objections are true. The second is not conclusive because persons who have studied the Bible in other ways also have arrived at incorrect conclusions. The first objection is neutralized when those who study the Bible critically allow criticism to take its place alongside other ways of using the Bible such as, for example, lectio divina, the slow, reflective reading of the Bible as a devotional practice.

A third progressive belief is that the best form of higher education is exploration rather than indoctrination. All informed Baptists are opposed to two extreme understandings of higher education, namely, brainwashing and relativism. Once those are eliminated, the choice is between indoctrination in which a tradition is transmitted and defended, and exploration in which the tradition is transmitted but also interrogated and nontraditional ideas are explored. This progressive belief is held by a minority of Baptists, though a majority of Baptists who are professionally engaged in higher education may hold it.

A final progressive belief is that Baptists should be ecumenical. Among Baptists today, the majority want to build bridges to some non-Baptists; the difference concerns where the bridges should be built. We have seen that the new leaders of the convention have built bridges to persons such as James Dobson and Franky Schaeffer. The progressive minority among Baptists would like to build bridges to Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.

None of the progressive beliefs has a bright future in the new Southern Baptist Convention. All are opposed by the new leaders of the convention.

Conclusion

My proposal in this article is that a wide variety of theological beliefs is to be found among Baptists in general and among Southern Baptists in particular. This becomes increasingly evident as one gives attention to the groups within and beyond Baptist life who share the various clusters of beliefs. While the separation of Baptists into different groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will lead to greater homogeneity within these groups, still an enormous variety remains within the groups.

None of this should distract us from what I believe to be an even more important fact, namely, that Baptists are Christians who share a range of beliefs not only with each other but with all other Christians as well. In my judgment, that "mere Christianity" which I attempted to describe in the first section of this article is the best "reason of the hope that is in" Baptists theologically. (9)

(1.) Bruce T. Gourley, The Godmakers: A Legacy of the Southern Baptist Convention? (Franklin: Providence House. Publishers, 1996), 9.

(2.) I have engaged in the same project elsewhere, and in this article I am drawing heavily on my earlier work. See Fisher Humphreys, The Way We Were: How Southern Baptist Theology Has Changed and What It Means to All of Us. rev. ed. (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2002).

(3.) H. Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 44-48.

(4.) The phrase appeared in the "Address to the Public" which was authorized by the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and was published on May 12, 1845, two days after the convention meeting ended. Robert A. Baker, The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People 1607-1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), 169-70.

(5.) Albert C. Outler, Ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 66.

(6.) Baker, 167.

(7.) The Baptist Faith and Message, Article VI, at <www.sbc.net>.

(8.) R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956). 269-70.

(9.) 1 Peter 3:15.

Fisher Humphreys is professor of divinity, Beeson Divinity, School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.