What makes a Baptist a Baptist? The ultimate and final answer, of course, is simple: membership in a local Baptist church. If the sisters and brothers vote you in, you are a Baptist. When a Baptist church accepts you, you are a Baptist. But there are all kinds of Baptist groups and Baptist churches! So what are the spiritual and theological marks of a Baptist? What are the generic "distinctives," the peculiar "convictions," the specific "ideals" that Baptists rally around and that make a Baptist a Baptist? What is the shape and feel of Baptist Christianity?
Winthrop Hudson, one of Baptists' best historians and keenest twentieth century interpreters, noted correctly that pioneer Baptists of seventeenth century England did not set out to identify "Baptist distinctives." Their concern was instead to be "faithful and obedient Christians" [and] their primary approach was to derive general theological principles from their serious and sincere study of the Bible.
Shurden seeks to identify what British Baptist H. Wheeler Robinson called "Baptist principles; what American Baptists in a confessional statement called "convictional genes; or what Baptist historian Edwin S. Gaustad called "that distillation, that essence, that defining difference that constitutes being Baptist." Shurden arrives at his now well known "four fragile freedoms": Bible freedom, soul freedom, church freedom and religious freedom. He did so by analyzing the sermons and addresses given by Baptists from around the world at the meetings of the Baptist World Alliance from 1905 to 1980. He outlines the following four freedoms:
Bible Freedom is the historic Baptist affirmation that the Bible, under the Lordship of Christ, must be central in the life of the individual and church and that Christians, with the best and most scholarly tools of inquiry, are both free and obligated to study and obey the Scripture.
Soul Freedom is the historic affirmation of the inalienable right and responsibility of every person to deal with God without the imposition of creed, the interference of clergy, or the intervention of civil government.
Church Freedom is the historic Baptist affirmation that local churches are free, under the Lordship of Christ, to determine their membership and leadership, to order their worship and work, to ordain whom they perceive as gifted for ministry, male or female, and to participate in the larger body of Christ, of whose unity and mission Baptists are proudly a part.
Religious Freedom is the historic Baptist affirmation of freedom OF religion, freedom FOR religion, and freedom FROM religion insisting that Caesar is not Christ and Christ is not Caesar.
Shurden also shared from a document issued by the Baptist Heritage Commission of the Baptist World Alliance in 1989 at Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia). Entitled “Towards a Baptist Identity,” the statement was deliberately descriptive rather than creedal. He used the five summary statements from this document in his book. They are as follows:
Baptists are:
- members of the whole Christian family who stress the experience of personal salvationthrough faith in Jesus, symbolized both in baptism and the Lord’s Supper;
- those who under the Lordship of Jesus Christ have bonded together in free local congregations, together seeking to obey Christ in faith and in life;
- those who follow the authority of Scriptures in all matters of faith and practice;
- those who have claimed religious liberty for themselves and all people;
- those who believe that the Great Commission to take the Gospel to the whole world is the responsibility of the whole membership.
Shurden ends with the following statement: "The historical Baptist identity, therefore, has been chiseled primarily from freedom rather than control, voluntaryism rather than coercion, individualism rather than a 'pack mentality,' personal religion rather than proxy religion, and diversity rather than uniformity" (p. 59).
There's food for thought here for NSW Baptists as we examine where we are and where we're going. More on the 1989 Zagreb statement in the next post.
Rev Rod Benson is an ethicist and a member of Dural Baptist Church.
1 comment:
It has long seemed to me significant that we Baptists emerged when we did. You can't divorce our nature from our times, and I think we should recognise that we were probably the first truly modern denomination.
The Tudors and the Stuarts stood for centralised government, dominated by a King whose power derived from God and was therefore unchallengeable.
The common people were viewed -- and had learned to view themselves -- as existing largely to support the rulers.
This situation could only be maintained by strict controls on both behaviour and thought. And the church largely aided the State in maintaining this uniformity.
The foundational Baptist declaration that neither King nor Bishop has a right to coerce a person's conscience; furthermore, that even Jews and Muslims had a right greater than that of the King, completely undermined the compact by which Church and State had existed side by side for generations.
I recognise that this compact was already collapsing by 1612, but I am concerned here with Baptists and not with the broader picture.
It is no wonder that Baptists were considered dangerous political radicals. Perhaps other Christian groups were beginning to think along these lines, but it was Thomas Helwys who piped up and said, "The emperor has no clothes!"
With this background in mind, I postulated in 1986 that core Baptist thinking can be reduced to the three essential concepts of free and equal access to God through Christ; free and equal access to his word, and a free and equal church in a free and equal society.
That is, for me, what Shurden describes as Soul Freedom is primary, but it must extend beyond freedom to incorporate the concept of equality. We do not hold that all are free to access God, but that some have a greater degree of access.
Similarly, what Shurden calls Bible Freedom is what I describe as "free and equal access to God's word", and once again the concept of equality is important. I suppose that we are really talking about equality of opportunity, because some will have skills and abilities in, say, the original languages or in the practice of exegesis, that others lack.
Where Shurdon finds two separate categories, Church Freedom and Religious Freedom, I think he has not actually gone far enough -- although I recognise that he has based his research on what preachers actually preach. In bringing these under the heading of a free and equal church in a free and equal society, I have attempted to indicate the common roots of our church polity and our historic social radicalism.
When Helwys challenged royal and ecclesiastical power to coerce consciences, by implication, he challenged Kings and Bishops as twin loci of power, because the conscience, incorporating both thoughts and emotions, is the driver of behaviour. And, unlike others before him, such as Sattler, Helwys allowed that all people have a right to be true to their consciences, not just Christians. This is social policy, not merely church polity.
But this radical overturning (in theory) of centuries of social convention could only survive in a truly equal as well as a truly free society. As soon as my freedom ceases to recognise your equal God-given possession of freedom, freedom degenerates into licence and chaos.
So, by cutting down the number of distinctives from four or five to three, I have sought to expand our idea of what makes us Baptist to include the implications of what we have long said, and not just the statements themselves.
Post a Comment