Southern Seminary Magazine (Vol 90.2) We Believe: Confessing Old Truths in a New Age

SOUTHERN SEMINARY MAGAZINE

The D.Min. is an extension of your current ministry, not a distraction from it. It’s about helping church leaders improve what you’re actively doing every day—faithfully ministering in the place you’ve been called. With professors that are practitioners as well as scholars, you can be sure that every aspect of your education is designed to fully equip you for more faithful service.

MPresident’s Message

r. albert mohler jr.

artin Luther rightly observed that the church house is to be a “mouth house” where words, not images or dramatic acts, stand at the center of the church’s attention and concern. We live by words, and we die by words.

Truth, life, and health are found in the right words. Paul will instruct Timothy that sound words come to us in a revealed pattern. “Follow the pattern of sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you” (2 Tim. 1:13–14).

Theological education is a deadly serious business. The stakes are so high. A theological seminary that serves faithfully will be a source of health and life for the church, but an unfaithful seminary will set loose a torrent of trouble, untruth, and sickness upon Christ’s people. Inevitably, the seminaries are the incubators of the church’s future. The teaching imparted to seminarians will shortly be inflicted upon congregations, where the result will be either fruitfulness or barrenness, vitality or lethargy, advance or decline, spiritual life or spiritual death.

Sadly, the landscape is littered with theological institutions that have poorly taught and have been poorly led. Theological liberalism has destroyed scores of seminaries, divinity schools, and other institutions for the education of the ministry. Many of these schools are now extinct, even as the churches they served have been evacuated. Others linger on, committed to the mission of revising the Christian faith to make peace with the spirit of the age.

How does this happen? Rarely does an institution decide, in one comprehensive moment of decision, to abandon the faith and seek after another. The process is far more dangerous and subtle. A direct institutional evasion would be instantly recognized and corrected, if announced honestly at the onset. Instead, theological disaster usually comes by means of drift and evasion, shading and equivocation. Eventually, the drift

accumulates into momentum, and the school abandons doctrine after doctrine, truth claim after truth claim, until the pattern of sound words, and often the sound words themselves, are mocked, denied, and cast aside in the spirit of theological embarrassment.

As James Petigru Boyce, founder of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued, “It is with a single man that error usually commences.” When he wrote those words in 1856, he knew that pattern by observation of church history. All too soon, he would know this sad truth by personal observation.

By the time Southern Baptists were ready to establish a theological seminary, many schools for the training of ministers had already been lost to theological liberalism. Drawing upon the lessons of the past, Southern Baptists were determined to establish schools bound by covenant and constitution to a confession of faith—to the pattern of sound words.

Confessional seminaries require professors to sign a statement of faith, designed to safeguard by explicit theological summary. The sad experience of fallen and troubled schools led Southern Baptists to require that faculty members must teach in accordance with the confession of faith and not contrary to anything therein.

We are living in an anti-confessional age. Our society and its reigning academic culture are committed to individual autonomy and expression as well as to an increasingly relativistic conception of truth. The language of higher education is overwhelmingly dominated by claims of academic freedom rather than academic responsibility. But, among us, a confession of faith must be seen as a gift and covenant. It is a sacred trust that guards revealed truths. A confession of faith never stands above the Bible, but the Bible itself mandates concern for the pattern of sound words.

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

from the editor

JEFF ROBINSON

A little over 25 years ago, I embraced confessional evangelical Christianity after attending a church that was rather proud of the fact that it had no confession of faith. The church adopted a slogan in place of a confession, a slogan attributed to various well-known figures from church history: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

To modern ears, that cliché has a ring of wisdom, but here’s the problem: the essentials and non-essentials were intentionally left undefined.

The consequences of the church’s theological murkiness emerged in a conversation I had with a man in the final few months I attended this church.

One Sunday morning I greeted a man who’d been visiting for several weeks and for the past two weeks sat in the back of Sunday school class I taught. I asked him where he had been attending church, and he answered: “I’ve been going to the Mormon church for many years now.” I was stunned. Aware of the monumental distance between Mormon doctrine and what the people in our church believed, I asked him what made him comfortable attending

an evangelical church. “You don’t seem to make anyone believe any particular doctrines, and I find that attractive.”

Almost instantly, I was transformed into a budding confessional Christian. I realized that if a church stands for everything, then it stands for nothing. A church or evangelical institution needs to communicate its theological and ethical convictions to a watching world for numerous reasons, not the least of which being so it can establish precisely what it believes about God and man and Scripture and salvation and much more.

As you will learn or be reminded in this issue of the Southern Seminary Magazine, we believe that a healthy church or a healthy seminary is one that clearly confesses what it believes and then commits to teach in accord with and not contrary to that statement of faith. The Bible teaches a very certain body of truth that is able to make one “wise unto salvation,” and a strong confession of faith will make those things clear.

In an age that denies the very possibility of absolute truth, an age that prefers a sentimental form of love to doctrinal precision, there is no place for ambiguity on such vital matters.

Fall 2022. vol. 90, no. 2. Copyright ©2022

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Vice President of Communications:

Dustin W. Benge

Managing Editor: Jeff Robinson

Copy Editor: C. Rebecca Rine

Creative Director: Stuart Hunt

Production Manager: Evan Sams

Graphic Designers: Dustin Benge, Stuart Hunt, Benjamin Aho

Photographer: Trevor Wheeker

Contributing Writers: R. Albert Mohler Jr., Peter Beck, Eric C. Smith, Joe Harrod, Stephen Presley, Raymond Johnson, Jarvis Williams, Jeff Robinson, Travis Hearne

Subscription Information:

Southern Seminary Magazine is published by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40280. The magazine is distributed digitally at equip.sbts.edu/magazine. If you would like to request a hard copy, please reach out by emailing communications@sbts.edu

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@TheSBTS @SBTS @SouthernSeminary

About the Cover:

The original Professors’ Subscription Book to the Abstract of Principles, Southern Seminary’s confession of faith. Every professor on the SBTS’ faculty agrees to “teach in accord with and not contrary to” the Abstract. It was written and adopted in 1858 as part of the seminary’s original charter.

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

am

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

by Peter Beck

by Eric C. Smith

redeeming the time with

FConfessional Integrity in a Time of Theological Crisis: The Abstract of Principles Then and Now

r . albert mohler jr .

rom the very beginning, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has been a confessional institution. Every professor must sign our confession of faith, the Abstract of Principles, agreeing to teach “in accordance with and not contrary to all that is contained therein.” This pledge has remained unchanged since 1859, but the history of Southern Seminary is a history with many twists and turns. The men who founded Southern Seminary understood themselves as confessional Protestants standing in a line of theological orthodoxy that found its quintessential shape in the Reformation of the 16th century and the Princeton Theology of the 19th century. They were also unapologetically

Baptist, and they perceived the need for a Baptist seminary in the South that would serve as the great central theological institution for the expanding Southern Baptist Convention. Though the convention was established in 1845, the dream of a seminary would be deferred until 1859.

Basil Manly Sr., long pastor of First Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, had urged Southern Baptists to establish a seminary, but it was a young man from his own congregation, James Petigru Boyce, who would become the driving force in Southern Seminary’s founding and, for many years, its very existence. On July 31, 1856, Boyce, then a new professor of theology at Furman University, would deliver the address that became the Magna Carta of Southern Seminary,

“Three

Changes in Theological Institutions.”

Boyce called for a central theological institution that would serve the entire denomination and beyond. He drew upon his experience at Princeton Theological Seminary, but he went beyond the Princeton model in calling for one school that would offer all ministers some level of theological education and would also offer the highest level of academic achievement available anywhere in the world. Such an institution would require, Boyce advised, an excellent faculty and adequate support, including a great theological library.

But Boyce’s third major point in his address was a warning that theological education must be guarded by a clear confession of faith, required of all faculty. Already, a host of theological schools had been lost to various heresies and the influence of theological liberalism—starting with Harvard Divinity School, founded in orthodoxy but largely lost to Unitarianism by the end of the 18th century. Basil Manly Jr., another of the founding faculty, had been urged by his father to leave the Newton Theological Institute, a Baptist school in Massachusetts, and to enroll at Princeton, a Presbyterian school, because Princeton was more orthodox and held to a higher view of the Bible. Boyce saw a theological crisis on the horizon:

A crisis in Baptist doctrine is evidently approaching, and those of us who still cling to the doctrines which formerly distinguished us, have the important duty to perform of earnestly contending for the faith once delivered to the saints. Gentlemen, God will call us to judgment if we neglect it.1

Boyce called for a confession of faith, clear and explicit, that would define the theological commitments of the school and its faculty. Every faculty member would be required not only to sign the statement but to believe all that it contained, without reservation. In his words:

But of him who is to teach the ministry, who is to be the medium through which the fountain of Scripture truth is to flow to them—whose opinions more than those of any living man, are to mold their conceptions of the doctrines of the Bible, it is manifest that much more is requisite. No difference, however slight, no peculiar sentiment, however speculative, is here allowable. His agreement with the standard should be exact. His declaration of it should be based on no mental reservation, upon no private understanding with those who immediately invest him into office; but the articles to be taught having been fully and distinctly laid down, he should be able to say

from his knowledge of the Word of God, that he knows these articles to be an exact summary of the truth therein contained. If the summary of truth established be incorrect, it is the duty of the Board to change it, if such change be within their power; if not, let an appeal be made to those who have the power, and if there be none such, then far better is it that the whole endowment be thrown aside than that the principle be adopted that the Professor sign any abstract of doctrine with which he does not agree, and in accordance with which he does not intend to teach. No Professor should be allowed to enter upon such duties as are there undertaken with the understanding that he is at liberty to modify the truth, which he has been placed there to inculcate.2

Boyce had learned that pattern of confessional subscription at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was influenced by the example set by that institution and the arguments taught by Professor Samuel Miller. Miller warned especially against the right of a professor to sign the confession with reservations or by a private understanding with those who assign him to teach.3 Princeton Theological Seminary’s own historic charter and bylaws required the professors to “solemnly promise to engage not to inculcate, teach, or insinuate anything which shall appear to me to contradict or contravene, either directly or indirectly, any thing taught in the said confession of faith or catechism … while I shall continue a Professor in this Seminary.”4

All this should indicate beyond question that confessional subscription was to be without any “hesitation or mental reservation,” in Boyce’s words, and without any private understanding between a faculty member and the president or Board of Trustees.

And yet, by the time I arrived at Southern Seminary as a student in 1980, that understanding of confessional commitment was absent from the majority of the faculty. Indeed, some professors openly expressed their disagreement with the Abstract of Principles. In my second year I took Systematic Theology with Professor Dale Moody, a titanic figure, who passed out his own revision of the Abstract early in the term.5 Moody considered himself a biblicist who would not defer to any human confession of faith over his own interpretation of the Scriptures. He also claimed to have entered the faculty in the 1940s by a private understanding with President John R. Sampey over Article XIII, “Perseverance of the Saints.”

As a student, I was surprised by Professor Moody’s candor, to say the least. At the same time, I was also aware that many other faculty members contradicted the

confession without Moody’s candor.

By the early 1970s open theological warfare broke out within the Southern Baptist Convention, and by the time I arrived as a seminary student, Southern Seminary was a prime battlefield. The Abstract of Principles was once again the focus of controversy, as Dale Moody was terminated from his teaching contract by President Roy L. Honeycutt due to Moody’s open contradiction of the Abstract of Principles. Nevertheless, the majority of the faculty expressed opposition to the Abstract as a regulative confession, and many argued in public that the statement of faith was open to individual interpretation. In essence, the argument was that the only way a professor could be found in conflict with the confession of faith is for the professor to declare that conflict.

That argument was made repeatedly in a book by retired Southern Seminary professors published in 1993 by Review & Expositor, then the Seminary’s faculty journal. Professor Dale Moody directly addressed the Abstract of Principles yet again. He recited the controversy that led to his termination and claimed that three successive presidents of Southern Seminary (John R. Sampey, Ellis Fuller, and Duke K. McCall) had allowed him to offer revisions or footnotes to the Abstract when signing it. Professor Willis Bennett, who had also served as provost of the seminary, looked back to his interview

with the Academic Personnel Committee of the Board of Trustees: “In 1959, when I was interviewed by a trustee committee before my election to the faculty, I was questioned about the confessional statement of the seminary, the Abstract of Principles. I provided my own interpretation and my comments satisfied the trustees. They viewed the Abstract, as did I, as a broad statement which provided room for differences of opinion while still accepting the parameters.”6 The problem is that while differences of opinion were certainly allowed, open conflict with the clear language of the Abstract was also allowed, and sometimes celebrated.

The issues of biblical inerrancy, inspiration, and authority were central to the controversy that so reshaped the Southern Baptist Convention in the last decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, but the controversy also ranged across the full spectrum of theological issues.

When the search committee looking for a new president came to me in 1993, a conservative majority on the Board of Trustees was looking to elect a conservative president. By that point, a majority of trustees had come to understand and affirm the necessity of reforming the seminary and of recovering theological orthodoxy. Many did not yet understand the centrality of the Abstract of Principles to that process.

Early in 1993, the search committee identified four

“I understood that one of my most significant responsibilities as the new president was to make the confessional nature of the seminary unmistakably clear. I also understood that the convocation message traditionally presented by the president for the opening of the new academic year was the right moment for such a public declaration.”

candidates to be interviewed. I was one of the four. In preparation for the interview, we were each asked for a statement on the Abstract of Principles. In response, I submitted a 42-page commentary covering each article of the confession. In the many hours of interview, I made clear that orthodoxy would require confessional correction, as understood by James P. Boyce and the other founders. The search committee eventually invited me to accept their nomination, and I made the same presentation over many hours with the full Board of Trustees. I was elected president on March 26, 1993.

I understood that one of my most significant responsibilities as the new president was to make the confessional nature of the seminary unmistakably clear. I also understood that the convocation message traditionally presented by the president for the opening of the new academic year was the right moment for such a public declaration.

There was more to the story. I also perceived that many of the seminary’s faculty and the vast majority of the students had virtually no idea of the founders’ vision of the Abstract of Principles and no real understanding of the school’s confessional history—much less an awareness of the confessional subscription and fidelity that was so central to the seminary’s founding and still required by contract of all faculty.

Boyce had actually added to the precedent of Princeton by requiring that the Abstract of Principles be signed

by every professor, and not merely affirmed verbally. So every single member of the faculty in 1993 had signed that very statement, agreeing to teach “in accordance with and not contrary to” all that it contained. At the very least, I was going to remind them of that commitment to which they had affixed their name by their own hand. Beyond that, I wanted to make very clear the path I would take as president, bringing the school into consistency with the confession of faith.

I entitled my address, “Don’t Just Do Something; Stand There,” using an expression I remembered from reading a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. That address was my manifesto of Southern Seminary’s identity, taking us back to the crisis in Baptist doctrine that James P. Boyce saw on the horizon in 1856 and making the argument that we were then engaged in that very crisis. That address is included in this issue.

More than 25 years later, I can only thank God for what has happened at Southern Seminary in this generation. The theological recovery for which we had longed, prayed, and worked has come to pass. This very volume is evidence of that. In this generation, every professor elected to the faculty gladly signs the Abstract of Principles in full public view during a convocation and gladly teaches all that it contains. Confessional fidelity is made clear at every stage in the hiring process and is a living and public commitment held in trust by the president, the faculty, and the Board of Trustees.

Every faculty member makes the sacred commitment to teach in accordance with and not contrary to the Abstract of Principles and the Baptist Faith and Message as adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. We elect to this faculty only professors who are eager to teach our confessional beliefs, not those who would be merely willing to do so. Our determination is to maintain this school for evangelical orthodoxy and Baptist faithfulness for generations to come.

In 1874, James P. Boyce recalled the establishment of the seminary and the adoption of the Abstract of Principles, reminding the Southern Baptist Convention that the confession of faith had been adopted not only by the seminary’s Board of Trustees, but by the special action of the 1858 Education Convention of the Southern Baptist Convention. He also reminded Baptists that the Abstract had been adopted as a statement of doctrines held nearly universally among Southern Baptists at the time.7

The Abstract of Principles was instrumental in the recovery of this seminary. We were able to point to the moral and contractual obligation agreed to by every professor, and to the very language that the founders used to frame this sacred commitment. Thus, this commitment is more than a doctrinal exposition or devotional exercise. It is the display of public fidelity to a confession of faith, to the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and daily host of The Briefing.

Notes

1. James P. Boyce, Three Changes in Theological Institutions: An Inaugural Address Delivered to the Board of Trustees of the Furman University, July 31, 1856 (Greenville: C. J. Elford’s Book and Job Press, 1856), 34.

2. Boyce, Three Changes, 35.

3. See Samuel Miller, “The Utility and Importance of Creeds and Confessions: An Address Delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary,” 1824.

4. “Of the Professors,” Charter and By-Laws, Princeton Theological Seminary, Article III, Section 3.

5. The fact that Professor Moody passed out this revision to students in his classes was denied by some seminary authorities at the time, but copies are contained within the Moody papers in the James P. Boyce Centennial Library, and Moody provided the same revision to the Board of Trustees in 1982. Interestingly, it later became known that President Duke K. McCall had asked at least some members of the faculty to provide proposed revisions to the Abstract of Principles in 1979, presumably in a more liberal direction. Moody responded with a long, multi-page letter, also found in the Moody papers collection. See also Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 1859-2009 (New York: Oxford University Press), 438-44.

6. Willis Bennett in “How I Changed My Mind: Essays by Retired Professors of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary” (Louisville: Review & Expositor, 1993), 88.

7. James P. Boyce, “Two Objections to the Seminary,” Western Recorder, June 20, 1874.

r . albert mohler jr .

A convocation address delivered by R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, August 31, 1993, in Alumni Memorial Chapel

“But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. And it was for this He called you through our gospel, that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us.”

(2 Thess. 2:13–15, NASB)

The seminary convocation, which opens each academic year, constitutes a unique gathering of the seminary community, assembled to welcome new students and new faculty, and to solemnize the beginning of a new seminary term. The roots of such an academic convocation are found in the British universities of Oxford and Durham, where for centuries the university communities have assembled to mark the inauguration of formal studies.

At Southern Seminary, the tradition is as old as the institution itself, for the very earliest minutes of the school record formal services at the start of each academic year. A convocation of the Southern Seminary family, gathered for worship and commemoration, is a fitting hallmark of the seminary’s tradition and is the cause of our gathering this day.

Today, you have witnessed a ceremony which has been a central part of this institution’s life and commitment for 134 years—the signing of the original Abstract of Principles.

The convergence of this ceremony as the first convocation of my service as president and as the occasion of placing my own signature on this sacred document prompts me to reflect upon the meaning of this confession, on its role as the seminary’s charter of fidelity, on the priceless heritage of faithfulness of those who have preceded us, and on the responsibility we collectively bear to keep faith with this body of biblical doctrine.

Russell Reno, professor of moral theology at Creighton University, recently reflected on the role of confessions in the church:

The impulse behind confessions of faith is doxological, the desire to speak the truth about God, to give voice to the beauty of holiness in the fullest possible sense. However, the particular forms that historical confessions take are shaped by confrontation. Their purpose is to respond to the spirit of the age by rearticulating in a pointed way the specific content of Christianity so as to face new challenges as well as new forms of old challenges. As a result, formal confessions are characterized by pointed distinctions. They are exercises in drawing boundaries where the particular force of traditional Christian claims is sharpened to heighten the contrast between orthodoxy and heresy, between true belief and false belief…. As they shape our beliefs, confessions structure our identities.1

My design today—on this day, which will ever remain sacred in my memory as the occasion of my own public attestation of this confession—is for us to consider the central role of the Abstract of Principles in structuring the identity of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The roots of that role are integral to the founding of this institution in the 1850s. The very idea of a central Baptist seminary was controversial then, and so it remained for over half a century. Baptists, though increasingly convinced of the need for an educated ministry, were suspicious of centralized structures and had long established a pattern of uneven cooperation in educational endeavors. The decline and loss of Columbian College was but the most celebrated embarrassment to Baptist educational efforts.

On the other hand, virtually all of the Baptist colleges and universities founded in the 19th century were established for the express purpose

of training ministers of the gospel and had developed theological departments of varying size and impact. Each had a loyal following, however, and none was ready to surrender its own institutional identity in order to meld a larger school. That was true, at least, until the rise of James Petigru Boyce.

Boyce, the son of a patriarchal South Carolina businessman and financier, brought together the threads of seminary aspiration left untied by so many others. As a 29-year-old theology professor at Furman University, Boyce delivered his inaugural address as what became the Magna Carta of Southern Seminary, “Three Changes in Theological Institutions.”

Educated at Brown University and Princeton Seminary, Boyce had followed a privileged educational pathway. In presenting his vision for a uniquely Southern Baptist theological institution, he drew from his own experiences at Brown and Princeton, his tenure as a newspaper editor, his deep rootage in what historian Walter Shurden has identified as the “Charleston Tradition” in Southern Baptist life, and the wisdom which had been imparted to him by the influence of others.

authority, was a necessary precondition to Southern Baptist support for a theological seminary.

Boyce delivered his weighty address, uncertain that Southern Baptists would ever respond to his call, but certain of his rectitude in pointing the denomination toward a vision for theological education that was open at some level to all persons, regardless of their educational preparation, offered the most strenuous programs to persons of exceptional preparation, and was firmly rooted in a confession of doctrinal principles binding upon all who would teach therein.

James

P. Boyce (1827–1888)

Southern’s First President

Among those who influenced Boyce, surely none exerted a more powerful moral, theological, and ministerial impact than Boyce’s former pastor and future trustee chairman, Basil Manly Sr. Manly, who had been pastor of First Baptist Church, Charleston, during Boyce’s boyhood, was one of the towering figures of the South, and of the Southern Baptist Convention. Manly was also an ardent confessionalist who believed that a confession of faith, clearly articulated and endowed with institutional

This last point, the third of Boyce’s three proposed changes, is our concern today. Boyce’s call was answered in the Educational Convention of 1857 and in the eventual founding of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Boyce was himself to be the central stack pole of the founding faculty.

But Boyce did not dream or serve alone. The most critical role in bringing the Abstract of Principles to final form was served by Basil Manly Jr., another of the four founding faculty members. The younger Manly had also enjoyed a Princeton Seminary education. Though he began his studies for the ministry at Newton Theological Institution, a Baptist school, he was directed to Princeton by his father, at least in part because Princeton was governed by a regulative confession of faith.

At Princeton, both Manly and Boyce had studied under the imposing figure of Samuel Miller, a stalwart defender of Presbyterian theological and ecclesiastical standards, who argued that “the necessity and importance of creeds and confessions appears from the consideration

“Every elected and tenured faculty member of this institution has freely and willfully affixed his or her name to this historic record and to this confession of faith.”

that one great design of establishing a church in our world was that she might be, in all ages, a depository, a guardian, and a witness of the truth.”2

That same conviction drove Boyce, both Manlys, John A. Broadus, and those who deliberated with the, to propose an Abstract of Principles based upon the Second London Confession, which was itself a Baptist revision of the Westminster Confession. The Second London Confession had been adopted in slightly revised form by the Baptist associations in Philadelphia and Charleston and had thus greatly influenced Baptists of both the North and the South.

Writing in 1874, Boyce detailed the principles which guided the drafting committee:

The Abstract of Principles must be: 1. A complete exhibition of the fundamental doctrines of grace, so that in no essential particular should they speak dubiously; 2. They should speak out clearly and distinctly as to the practices universally prevalent among us; 3. Upon no point, upon which the denomination is divided, should the convention, and through it, the seminary, take any position.3

This explanation clarifies the Abstract’s originating process and underlines the incredible theological unity of Southern Baptists at the middle of the 19th century. The members of the drafting committee were certain that Southern Baptists were undivided on “the fundamental doctrines of grace” and that the matters which threatened denominational unity—and were thus avoided by the confession—dealt with issues related to the Landmark

controversies, in particular to questions of baptism, alien immersion, and to related issues.

The committee protected the integrity of the confession’s witness to the doctrines of grace and, as Boyce indicated, spoke dubiously on no essential particular. Indeed, the Abstract remains a powerful testimony to a Baptist theological heritage that is genuinely evangelical, Reformed, biblical, and orthodox.

When the Committee on the Plan of Organization brought its report in 1858—just one year before classes would begin—the fundamental laws of the institution stipulated that the Abstract of Principles, “selected as the fundamental principles of the gospel, shall be subscribed to by every professor elect, as indicative of his concurrence in its correctness as an epitome of biblical truth; and it shall be the imperative duty of the board to remove any professor of whose violation of the pledge they feel satisfied.”4

In that spirit, every elected and tenured faculty member of this institution has freely and willfully affixed his or her name to this historic record and to this confession of faith.

In publishing their report, the committee also indicated that the Abstract “will always be a guarantee as to the safety of the funds now contributed, against any perversion from their original intention.” The confession was designed to be compact, but “without obscurity or weakness.” Its articles begin with the issue of Holy Scripture, and there is affirmed the basis of all Christian knowledge—the knowledge of the true God who has graciously and freely revealed himself to his creatures— in Scripture inspired by God which is sufficient, certain,

Nassau Hall, Princeton University, 1836

“The founders of this institution were quite ready to speak of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, of evangelical truth and heresy. This was a vocabulary used with individuals certain of the reality of divine revelation and the necessity of orthodox teaching. These issues were taken with deadly seriousness.”

and authoritative. In their certainty they bear witness to the perfection and unblemished truthfulness of God’s self-revelation through the written Word.

From there the Abstract is bold to confess that this God who has spoken is none other than the one sovereign Lord and creator of the universe, infinite in all his divine perfections, “the maker, Preserver, and Ruler of all things.”

Furthermore, God is revealed to be a Trinity of three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, “without division of nature, essence, or being.” Those who voice assaults ancient or modern upon the integrity of the Trinity will find no comfort here.

This God revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “decrees or permits all things that come to pass, and perpetually upholds, directs, and governs all creatures and all events.” No more comprehensive witness to the reality of divine providence is imaginable. This God is neither inert nor inactive nor ineffectual. The relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom is beyond our limited understanding, but God is God, and his sovereignty is unconditioned.

The Abstract testifies to the grace-filled doctrine of election as “God’s choice of some persons into everlasting life—not because of unforeseen merit in them, but of his mere mercy in Christ.” But of his mere mercy in Christ! Could there be any more eloquent affirmation of God’s saving purpose in election?

The confession also points directly to the issue of

human sin through the fall, whereby human beings created in the image of God and thus free from sin “transgressed the command of God” and fell from perfection and holiness, such that all now inherit a nature “corrupt and wholly opposed to God and his law,” and become actual transgressors when capable of moral action. Therein is our condemnation.

But Jesus Christ, the “divinely appointed Mediator,” took on human form, yet without sin, and “suffered and died upon the cross for the salvation of sinners.” This same Jesus was buried, rose again the third day, and ascended to his Father, from whose right hand he “ever liveth to make intercession for his people.” Beyond all this, he is “the only Mediator, the Prophet, Priest, and King of the Church, and Sovereign of the universe.”

God’s salvific purpose is demonstrated in regeneration, whereby the sinful heart, wholly opposed to God in itself, is quickened and enlightened “spiritually and savingly,” as “a work of God’s free and special grace alone.” Therein is our salvation.

Then the Abstract points to repentance, by which we are “made sensible of the manifold evil” of our individual sin and respond by means of this “evangelical grace” so that, with sorrow, detestation of sin, and self-abhorrence, we seek to “walk before God so as to please him in all things.”

Faith is then believing on God’s authority the gospel concerning Christ, “accepting and resting on him alone for justification and eternal life.” This too is a

divine gift wrought by the Holy Spirit to those who are unworthy and, on their own part, unable to conjure faith unaided by the Spirit.

Those who have trusted in Christ by faith are then justified and acquitted before God through the satisfaction that Christ has made, “not for anything wrought in them or done by them; but on account of the obedience and satisfaction of Christ, they receiving and resting on him.”

Thereafter comes sanctification, by which the redeemed are granted divine strength so as to press “after a heavenly life in cordial obedience to all Christ’s commands.”

Those whom God has redeemed in Christ “will never totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace but shall certainly persevere to the end.” Even though they may fall, they are “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation.”

In successive articles the Abstract affirms and confesses Jesus Christ as the head of the church; the church as the possessor of all “needful authority for administering that order, discipline, and worship which he hath appointed”; baptism by immersion in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit as the sign of fellowship with the death and resurrection of Christ, of remission of sin, and of consecration unto God; the Lord’s Supper as the church’s ordinance of commemoration of Christ’s death and as “a bond, pledge, and renewal of their communion with him”; of the Lord’s Day as a regular observance of worship, both public and private; of liberty of conscience on issues “which are in anything contrary to his Word, or not contained in it,” and yet of subjugation to civil magistrates in all lawful things.

The Abstract also confesses that our bodies return to dust after death, but our spirits return immediately to God—“the righteous to rest with him; the wicked, to be reserved under darkness to the judgment.” At the last day, the bodies of both the just and the unjust will be raised. On the appointed Day of Judgment, God will judge the world by Jesus Christ, and “the wicked shall go into everlasting punishment; the righteous into everlasting life.”

In this we have inherited a priceless and grace-filled testimony to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the eternal truths revealed in Holy Scripture.

Philip Schaff, whose great work The Creeds of Christendom remains an indispensable classic, defined a creed, however it is labeled, as “a confession of faith for public use, or a form of words setting forth with authority certain articles of belief which are regarded by the framers as necessary for salvation, or at least for the well-being of the Christian Church.”5

Schaff well described the purpose of the founders of Southern Seminary in framing the Abstract of Principles.

It is a testimony to those central doctrines necessary to salvation, and to other issues essential to the well-being of the Christian church.

What operative convictions are revealed in the Abstract and in the testimony of those who framed the confession?

First, that truth is always confronted with error, and that the doctrinal depository of the church is ever in danger of compromise. The founders of this institution were quite ready to speak of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, of evangelical truth and heresy. This was a vocabulary used with individuals certain of the reality of divine revelation and the necessity of orthodox teaching. These issues were taken with deadly seriousness.

They offered no apology for stipulating doctrinal issues, nor for demanding theological fidelity. In fact, Boyce specifically aimed his critical sights at “that sentiment, the inevitable precursor, or the accompaniment of all heresy—that the doctrines of theology are matters of mere speculation, and that its distinctions only logo machines and technicalities…”6 There is no theological indifference to be found here—no doctrinal minimalism or lowest common doctrinal denominator is the focus or sentiment.

This is a robust, full-orbed faith from beginning to end; a faith which would establish Southern Seminary on its rightful course.

Southern Seminary was established in the very year Darwin published his The Origin of Species. Critical philosophies were already spreading from Europe to the United States. Harvard had fallen to Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Established seminaries in the North, once considered secure in the faith, were now seen to be wavering. Boyce and his colleagues saw a “crisis in Baptist doctrine” approaching, and they were determined that Southern Seminary be ready.7

Second, that a confession of faith is a necessary, proper, and instrumental safeguard against theological atrophy or error. As Boyce argued, “It is based upon principles and practices sanctioned by the authority of Scripture and by the usage of our people.” Further, “you will receive by this assurance that the truth committed unto you by the founders is fulfilled in accordance with their wishes, that the ministry that go forth have here learned to distinguish truth from error, and to embrace the former….”

Beyond this, the confession is a safeguard to trustees, to faculty, to students, and to the denomination:

It seems to me … that you owe this to yourselves, to your professors, and to the denomination at large; to yourselves because your position as

“Let those who would understand Southern Seminary understand this: That our faith is not in the Abstract of Principles, but in the God to whom it testifies; that the revealed text we seek rightly to divide is not the Abstract of Principles, but Holy Scripture, but that this Abstract is a sacred contract and confession for those who teach here—who willingly and willfully affix their signatures to its text and their conscience to its intention. They pledge to teach ‘in accordance with and not contrary to’ its precepts.”

r . albert mohler jr .

trustees makes you responsible for the doctrinal positions of your professors, and the whole history of creeds has proved the difficulty without them of correcting errorists of perversions of the Word of God—to your professors, that their doctrinal sentiments may be known and approved by all, that no charges of heresy be brought against them; that none shall whisper of peculiar notions which they hold, but that in refutation of all charges they may point to this formulary as one which they hold ex animo, and teach in its true import and to the denomination at large, that they may know in what truths the rising ministry are instructed, may exercise full sympathy with the necessities of the institution, and may look with confidence and affection to the pastors who come forth from it.8

Here is where the institution would stand, before God and before the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. The founders were certain that this was solid ground, and in this they were surely right.

Third, that a theological institution bears a unique responsibility to protect the integrity of the gospel, and that its professors should give their unmixed and public attestation to the confession of faith. As Boyce commented:

You will infringe the rights of no man, and you will secure the rights of those who have established here an instrumentality for the production of a sound ministry. It is no hardship to those who teach here to be called upon to sign the declaration of their principles, for there are fields of usefulness open elsewhere to every man, and none need accept your call who cannot conscientiously sign your formulary.

Fourth, that those who teach the ministry bear the greatest burden of accountability to the churches and to the denomination.

Boyce delivered his address as the ghost of Alexander Campbell still haunted the Baptist mind. Campbell criticized confessions of faith as assaults upon freedom of conscience and, as Boyce lamented, “threatened at one time the total destruction of our faith.” As Boyce feared, “Had he occupied a chair in one of our theological institutions, that destruction might have been completed.”

“It is with a single man that error usually commences,” argued Boyce. “Scarcely a single heresy has ever blighted the church which has not owed its existence to one man of power and ability whose name has always been associated with its doctrines.” Boyce specifically identified

Campbellism and Arminianism.

Those who founded this institution were painfully and solemnly aware of the history of heresy, which included Arianism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Socinianism—a parade of doctrinal deviation. And they were determined to safeguard the institution they would establish, insofar as human determination would suffice. They knew nothing of radical revisionist theologies which would follow, of process philosophy and deconstructionism, of demythologization and logical positivism. But they knew the pattern of compromise and deviation which marked the checkered history of the church and its testimony to the truth. They had seen the radical Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and they had seen enough to understand the challenge.

The faculty of Southern Seminary would be held to a standard higher than that required of the churches, higher than that required of students, higher than that required of those who would teach at many sister institutions. As Boyce stipulated:

But of him who is to teach the ministry, who is to be the medium through which the fountain of Scripture truth is to flow to them—whose opinions more than those of any living man, are to mold their conceptions of the doctrines of the Bible, it is manifest that more is requisite. No difference, however slight, no peculiar sentiments, however speculative, is here allowable. His agreement with the standard should be exact. His declaration of it should be based upon no mental reservation, upon no private understanding with those who immediately invest him into office; but the articles to be taught being distinctly laid down, he should be able to say from his knowledge of the Word of God that he knows these articles to be an exact summary of the truth therein contained.

Let those who would understand Southern Seminary understand this: that our faith is not in the Abstract of Principles, but in the God to whom it testifies; that the revealed text we seek rightly to divide is not the Abstract of Principles, but Holy Scripture, but that this Abstract is a sacred contract and confession for those who teach here—who willingly and willfully affix their signatures to its text and their conscience to its intention. They pledge to teach “in accordance with and not contrary to” its precepts.

The Abstract is not something foreign which has been imposed upon this institution—it is the charter of its existence and its license to teach the ministry. Its purpose is unity, not disunity; its heart is bent toward

common confession.

In some sectors of theological education, confessionalism is assumed and charged to be dead—a fossil of an ancient era when the church claimed and proclaimed objective truth on the basis of divine revelation.

Some would now celebrate what Edward Farley has identified as the “collapse of the house of authority.”9 Confessions, creeds, doctrines, truth claims, supernaturalism, theism, commands—all these are swept away by the acids of modernity.

It cannot be so here. Not because we are unaware of the currents of modern knowledge; not because we do not understand the challenges of a relativistic and secular age, where all issues of truth and meaning are automatically privatized and politicized; not because we are unaware of the hermeneutics of suspicion, but precisely because we have faith in God, and in his truth unchanged and unchanging. Our motive is not to seek false refuge in an antiquarian past absolved of all its faults and blemishes, but to keep the faith once for all delivered to the saints. We fear no charges of foundationalism, positivism, or authoritarianism. We do fear God and his divine judgment.

The Abstract is our most fundamental centering covenant with each other as faculty, students, president,

and trustees. For students, it is the framework within which you should expect to receive instruction and education. You will not be tested by the Abstract upon your arrival nor your departure, but it should frame your expectations and assure the confessional parameters of your study here. It is a pledge your professors have made before they enter your classroom to teach, and it is because they so highly esteem their calling to teach the ministers of the church that they have come here and committed their lives to serve the church and the cause of Christ by investing their lives in you. They do so gladly, heartily, and with consecration. They deserve your utmost respect, affection, and dedicated attention. For faculty, the Abstract is the charter to teach and the standard of confessional judgment. Southern Seminary is a confessional institution, a pre-committed institution. Teachers here should expose students to the full array of modern variants of thought related to their courses of study. But these options are not value-neutral. The standard of judgment is found within the parameters of the Abstract. In this charter is found the platform for true academic excellence, where all fields of study are submitted to the most rigorous and analytical study; but also found here is the standard for confessional fidelity to the churches and the denomination, for these fields

The Abstract of Principles signed by the founding faculty of Southern Seminary.

of study and research are conducted by those who have established their own confessional commitments and who make these plain and evident to those who come here to study and to learn.

But the importance and impact of the Abstract of Principles and of Southern Seminary reaches much farther. We have arrived at a critical moment for the Southern Baptist Convention and its churches. A denomination once marked by intense theological commitment and a demonstrable theological consensus has seen that doctrinal unity pass into a programmatic consciousness. We are in danger of losing our theological grammar and, more seriously by far, of forfeiting our theological inheritance.

This crisis far outweighs the controversy which has marked the Southern Baptist Convention for the last fourteen years. That controversy is a symptom rather than the root cause. As Southern Baptists, we are in danger of becoming God’s most unembarrassed pragmatists—much more enamored with statistics than invested in theological substance.

The Abstract is a reminder that we bear a responsibility to this great denomination, whose name we so proudly bear as our own. We bear the collective responsibility to call this denomination back to itself and its doctrinal inheritance. This is a true reformation and revival only the sovereign God can accomplish, but we must strive to be acceptable and usable instruments of that renewal.

The Abstract represents a clarion call to start with conviction rather than mere action. It cries out “Don’t just do something; stand there!” This reverses the conventional wisdom of the world, but it puts the emphasis rightly. Southern Baptists are now much more feverishly concerned with doing than with believing—and thus our denominational soul is in jeopardy. This people of God must reclaim a theological tradition which understands all of our denominational activity to be founded upon prior doctrinal commitments. This is true for the denomination at every level—and of the local churches as well.

But this message is also critical for the future of theological education and of Southern Seminary. We can never measure our life and work in terms of activity and statistics. In the view of eternity, we will be judged most closely not on the basis of how many courses were taught, how many students were trained, how many syllabi were printed, or how many books were published, but on whether or not we kept the faith.

The other issues are hardly irrelevant, and they are valid markers of institutional stewardship and ministry. But there is a prior question: Does the institution and those who teach here stand for God’s truth, and do so without embarrassment? May we answer that question with the humble confidence of Martin Luther and say, “Here we stand; we can do no other. God help us.”

R. Albert Mohler Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and daily host of The Briefing.

Notes

1. Russell Reno, “At the Crossroads of Dogma,” in Reclaiming the Faith, ed. Ephraim Radner and George R. Sumner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 105. Inaugural Convocation Address xvii.

2. Samuel Miller, Doctrinal Integrity (Philadelphia, 1824), 11.

3. James P. Boyce, “The Doctrinal Position of the Seminary,” The Western Recorder, June 20, 1874. Fifth in a series of articles. This article was reprinted in Review & Expositor, January 1944, 18–24.

4. “Report of the Committee on Organization,” The Southern Baptist, May 11, 1858, 1.

5. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom: With a History and Critical Notes, Three volumes (New York: Harper and Row, 1931), I:3.

6. James Petigru Boyce, “Three Changes in Theological Institutions,” in James Petigru Boyce: Selected Writings, ed. Timothy E George (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1989), 49.

7. Ibid., 49.

8. Ibid., 52. All further citations from James P. Boyce are from this address, ad passim, unless otherwise noted.

9. Edward Farley, Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), see esp. 165–70.

10. Phrase borrowed from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Truth Unchanged, Unchanging (Westchester, IL: Crossway Publishers, 1993.

“The Abstract is a reminder that we bear a responsibility to this great denomination, whose name we so proudly bear as our own. We bear the collective responsibility to call this denomination back to itself and its doctrinal inheritance.”

“I am Southern Baptist”: A Confessional People and Their Confession of Faith

“Who are you?”, the criminal once asked Batman. “Who are you?”, the Who once asked their generation.

In one sense, the answer should be obvious. We ought to be able to answer as Popeye did: “I am who I am, and that’s all that I am.” But, is it really? Can your identity be boiled down to one easy statement? “I’m Peter.” Or, “I’m a pastor.” “I’m Karis’ father.” “I’m Melanie’s husband.” You get the idea. Who you are is not one thing or another. It’s the aggregate of many things.

If that’s true of each of us as individuals, how much more complex must the answer be when we answer as a body, as a gathering of diverse yet somehow like-minded folk who share a common identity? Now, think of the complexity of the answer to that question when the answer represents the collective sentiments of millions of people in a denomination or even a movement that spans the globe.

Yet people ask us all the time, “Who are you? What’s a Baptist? How are you different than any other church or religious group?”

One would hope that any church-going Southern Baptist could answer such questions with

aplomb. But can they?

I regularly begin a class on Baptist theology by asking doctoral students, “What does it mean to be Baptist?” I get all the expected answers. “We practice believer’s baptism by immersion.” So? So do many evangelical groups who aren’t Baptists. “We believe in congregational polity.” Yeah, so do some of your charismatic neighbors. “We hold to regenerate church membership.” And? Around and around we go.

They eventually get my point just as you did. Baptists are all those things. And more. Thus, the answer to the question, “Baptists, who are you?”, is complex. The answer to that question is found in our corporate identity and, as Southern Baptists, in our corporate confession of faith.

Southern Baptists and Their Confession of Faith

The founding president of the Southern Baptist Convention, William B. Johnson, famously and erroneously said Baptists have no creed but the Bible. The irony, of course, is such a statement is a creedal statement, a summary statement of belief, personal or otherwise. He said it because he believed it. Most Baptists didn’t.

From the start Baptists have been a confessional people. This was true of Baptists in Europe. It was true of Baptists in America. In fact, as Baptists began to form unions for cooperation, they did so around confessional statements like the Philadelphia Confession or the Charleston Confession. For Baptists further north, it was the New Hampshire Confession of Faith. This was true for churches, associations, and denominations.

Not even a generation after Johnson’s profession, Baptists in his own state of South Carolina produced a confession of faith for the founding of what became the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1859. Thus, the Abstract of Principles became the theological statement of what it meant to be a Southern Baptist in the South for generations as pastors and denominational leaders were taught “in accordance with and not contrary to” the Abstract of Principles. Virtually from the outset, Southern Baptists professed a corporate faith that defined them as a movement and shaped their disciplemaking endeavors.

In the ensuing years, statements of faith like the Abstract were also used to protect the denomination from theological drift. Such was the case with the dismissal of Lottie Moon’s onetime fiancé, Crawford Howell Toy, in 1879. Toy lost his professorial appointment at Southern Seminary not simply because he refused to adhere to the Abstract but because his own faith commitments had moved beyond it. He was, in essence, no longer a Southern Baptist, as evidenced by his failure to teach in accordance with the confession of that people. In due time, Toy left Baptist life behind altogether for Unitarianism.

Those ideals which informed Toy’s departure from Southern Baptist life impacted other denominations at the end of the 19th century as well. Modernism in its many forms led pastors like Presbyterian David Swing to reject all confessional statements before leaving his own denomination. A generation later, the Baptist Harry Emerson Fosdick could pastor a Presbyterian church, because the orthodoxy of one generation no longer held any authority over the next. Many in that day agreed and saw no problem with the pastoral arrangement. Some even went so far as to encourage Fosdick to simply become a Presbyterian to end the turmoil. He refused, left the church, and founded a nondenominational church with the backing of John D. Rockefeller.

Rise of the BF&M

Denominational and theological laxity were not the only challenges confronting Southern Baptists in the opening decades of the 20th century. Modernism’s dalliance with Darwinism also struck close to home. As the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial upheld a Tennessee law enforcing the teaching of creationism in public schools, public sentiment was beginning to shift on the matter. Creationists won in the court of law but lost ground in the court of public opinion. As these events unfolded, Southern Baptists were caught positionally unaware. It’s not that Southern Baptists didn’t have an opinion about Darwinian evolution. In true Baptist form, they had many, but they didn’t have any official position.

At the same time, calls for reconciliation with Northern Baptists 60 years after the Civil War were growing

“Denominational and theological laxity were not the only challenges confronting Southern Baptists in the opening decades of the 20th century. Modernism’s dalliance with Darwinism also struck close to home.”

louder from some quarters. Southern Baptists sent representatives to the Northern Baptist Convention to further these discussions and explore the idea of reunification.

In light of all this, Edgar Young Mullins, then president of Southern Seminary and president of the SBC, called for the formation of a committee to formalize the denomination’s theological views—in essence to define what it meant to be Southern Baptist. In 1925, even as Northern Baptists rejected a similar call to adopt a denominational confession of faith, one based on the long-revered New Hampshire Confession, Southern Baptists adopted their own based on that same confession. That year they affirmed the Baptist Faith and Message as a statement of their collective beliefs, a “consensus of opinions.”

Troubling Revision of the BF&M

Not 40 years later, Southern Baptists would again answer the call to define and refine their faith in light of theological controversy. In the 1960s, debate raged within the convention over how one reconciles the creation narrative of Genesis with the scientific narrative of evolution.

One might ask: if this was part of the impetus for the creation of the BF&M in the first place in 1925, why must it be dealt with again? The answer is easy. While the Preamble affirmed a supernatural reading of Scripture and the world around us, an explicit statement regarding evolution and Scripture was deleted from the initial draft of the Baptist Faith and Message before it was ratified by the denomination. Thus, the problem remained unresolved and had to be addressed again by a later generation.

Under the leadership of Herchel Hobbs, the SBC formed another committee and issued an updated version of the BF&M in 1963. A firmer, though still not concrete, statement on theological commitments about the controversies of the age emerged. The updated statement presented a compromise meant to narrow the boundaries of Southern Baptist theological life in such a way as to answer the present concern without constraining the idea of liberty of conscience Baptists hold dear. As a result, while church members were being discipled according to the teachings of the BF&M via Hobbs’ own commentary on the confession, others in the seminaries and elsewhere were able to claim adherence to the revised doctrinal statement while also holding views contrary to the faith of the rank-and-file membership of the SBC, those things they claimed “with which they have been and are now closely identified.”

In a very real sense, the Baptist Faith and Message (1963) failed to unite the denomination in faith. The controversies that prompted the formation of a committee to revisit the statement festered for nearly another

decade due to political maneuvering by some involved. The result was that the denomination’s faith statement no longer accurately represented the united faith of the denomination as a whole. Such theological diversity led to theological division. Within a decade and a half, the movement that would become the Conservative Resurgence was birthed, and the battle for the heart of the convention was on.

This denominational tug-of-war drug on into the 1990s. When it was over, the conservatives reclaimed the denomination’s entities from the theologically broaderminded Moderates. More importantly, they saw the opportunity to reaffirm the Southern Baptist faith they believed was compromised over the preceding 70 years and called the convention back to its theological roots.

Y2K and the End of the World As We Know It

The year 2000 was burdened with great theological and prophetic significance. Such was already the case for hundreds of years before the coming of the new millennium. As the historical moment drew closer, it appeared Nostradamus and others might be right.

Of course, the apocalypse didn’t begin on January 1 any more than did all the computers in the world crash as predicted. Yet the year 2000 and the years surrounding it did usher in an era of change for Southern Baptists.

Firmly in the hands of the conservatives, the SBC experienced significant change in its leadership and its institutions. New trustees were elected, new presidents hired. And, in one sense, the old faith was rediscovered. However, as the millennium was set to begin, Southern Baptists had yet to address definitively the issue that led to the donnybrook recently ended: the Baptist Faith and Message. To prevent yet another round of theological controversy, something had to change.

An important step was taken in the closing years of the 1990s to do just that. Then SBC President Tom Elliff presciently appointed a committee in 1997 to bring a proposal back to the convention addressing the coming social storm over the nature of the family as defined by the Bible. This proposal came in the form of new article on “The Family” that was to be added to the Baptist Faith and Message. The convention affirmed this proposal in 1998. While it caused a minor denominational dustup, its impact would pale in comparison to what was just over the theological horizon. It proved to be an omen of things to come.

In 1999, Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Southern Baptist Convention, appointed a “blue ribbon committee,” a veritable who’s who of the Conservative Resurgence, to review the BF&M and present any recommendations to

“Creeds and confessions are meant to be inclusive. They identify those doctrines or theological hallmarks that characterize a particular body of believers. In other words, creeds and confessions define or identify those within a religious body by their shared system of beliefs. If one shares those beliefs, they are included as part of that body.”

the convention at its annual meeting in 2000. This committee would return with a revision that would address many of the perceived flaws that allowed for the divisions only recently resolved.

As the committee observed in their final report, “Baptists are a people of deep beliefs and cherished doctrines. Throughout our history we have been a confessional people, adopting statements of faith as a witness to our beliefs and a pledge of our faithfulness to the doctrines revealed in Holy Scripture.” Moreover, they added, “Our confessions of faith are rooted in historical precedent, as the church in every age has been called upon to define and defend its beliefs.”

Working from the position of historical precedent, the committee reviewed the BF&M in light of the earlier versions and “the ‘certain needs’ of our own generation.” In other words, doing what Baptists have always done, they revisited the Baptist faith as it had been handed down to them with a view toward clarifying and amending it to address the challenges of the present age.

Unlike its predecessors at certain points, the 2000 update of the Baptist Faith and Message addressed the “certain needs” head on and narrowed the theological definitions provided. In places, language was clarified. In others, articles were modified to reflect contemporary debates earlier writers could not have foreseen. Beyond that, the current version of the BF&M largely mirrors the wording of earlier editions.

The most significant changes brought forward for consideration were arguably found in the introduction to

the confession, the Preamble. There the committee omitted the language of 1963 which stated, “The sole authority for faith and practice among Baptists is Jesus Christ whose will is revealed in the Holy Scriptures.” For many, such a hermeneutical principle proved too subjective and allowed for theological variances that might be cloaked in pious claims of Christlikeness that pitted long-held views against modern concerns.

Such a possible interpretation is highlighted by the next statement the new version of the Preamble also deleted: “A living faith must experience a growing understanding of truth and must be continually interpreted and related to the needs of each new generation.” Whether it was the intent of the 1963 framers or not, such was the language of those like Toy who abandoned the ancient faith in the name of modernizing it for their generation, something many believed to have continued to happen in the 20th century SBC. Instead, the new Preamble simply states, “Our living faith is established upon eternal truths.” Thus, the Baptist Faith and Message as adopted in 2000 seeks to ground “those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us” in unchangeable truth.

While the proposed updates were broadly accepted within the SBC, some took exception to the latest revision of the BF&M. A number of individuals and churches left the denomination over what they perceived to be violations of other key Baptists ideals such as soul competency and liberty of conscience. Such people were no longer convinced that the Baptist Faith and Message

was no longer truly Baptist. Still others chose to remain within the Southern Baptist Convention but retained the use of the Baptist Faith and Message (1963) as their personal or congregational confession of faith.

At the end of the day, while affirmation of the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) is not a requirement of fellowship within the Southern Baptist Convention, it is the official confessional document of the denomination. It is theological self-portrait of a people called Southern Baptists. It is who we think we are.

Baptist Identity Defined and Defended

In the aftermath of 2000 and the ratification of the latest version of the Baptist Faith and Message, some claimed the denomination’s confessional statement moved beyond confession and consensus to creed. Using the concept of creed as a pejorative, they meant to imply the BF&M was now being used as a test of orthodoxy, a litmus test for the purpose of exclusion rather than inclusion. Such an argument betrays a theological and political bias that ignores the meaning of the word itself and the historical use of creeds through the ages.

The term “creed” is drawn from the ancient term credo which simply means “I believe.” Or, as one modern dictionary defines it: a set of fundamental beliefs. The historical and contemporary use of confessions of faith in Southern Baptist life echoes these definitions.

Likewise, church history is replete with examples of the twofold use of confessional statements found in 21st century Southern Baptist life.

First, creeds and confessions are meant to be inclusive.

They identify those doctrines or theological hallmarks that characterize a particular body of believers. In other words, creeds and confessions define or identify those within a religious body by their shared system of beliefs. If one shares those beliefs, they are included as part of that body.

Second, creeds and confessions are meant to be exclusive. They are used to identify those who do not belong to such bodies, not in a punitive sense but a protective one. Those who do not identify with the body with their rejection of that body’s beliefs are prevented from joining or changing that body. They are excluded from membership because they refuse to identify with the members.

Thus, as one looks at Southern Baptist history, we have adopted confessions of faith to define this unique body of believers by identifying those doctrines that give us our unique identity within the larger Christian church. These confessions were then used to train our pastors and disciple our parishioners as to what we believe the Bible teaches. In so doing, the Baptist Faith and Messages does more than provide a summary of what Southern Baptists believe. It shapes what we believe. It defines who we are. It defends our convictions and our churches from external challenge.

Peter Beck serves as lead pastor of Doorway Baptist Church in North Charleston, SC, and as associate professor of Christian studies at Charleston Southern University. Peter is a Ph.D. graduate of Southern Seminary.

1922: Northern Baptists Lose Their Confession

eric c . smith

One hundred years ago, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached one of the most controversial sermons of the 20th century. Delivered on May 21, 1922, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” immediately ignited a national firestorm. Today, historians remember it as a defining moment in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s. The occasion of the infamous message, however, has been largely forgotten.

Fosdick, reared in a conservative Baptist home, preached with the annual gathering of the Northern Baptist Convention—meeting just three weeks later—squarely in his sights. Formed in 1907, the Northern Baptist Convention was still a relatively young denomination in 1922. Yet tensions between the NBC’s fundamentalist and modernist factions had been escalating since the end of World War I. The modernists were eager to update the Christian faith with contemporary ideas about evolutionary science and the historical-critical study of the Bible. In the process, they radically altered or discarded many tenets of traditional theology, from the complete accuracy of the Scriptures to the bodily resurrection of Jesus. The modernist project had begun within Baptist colleges and seminaries in the late 19th century; by 1922, it had progressed into many of the denomination’s leading churches.

Standing in their path were the fundamentalists, described by their own Curtis Lee Laws as “aggressive conservatives who feel that it is their duty to contend for the faith.” Alarmed at the rapid advance of liberal theology in American culture and in their denomination (northern Presbyterians, led by J. Gresham Machen, waged

a simultaneous battle throughout the decade), a diverse assortment of these “aggressive conservatives” banded together after the Great War to recover what they had lost.

Both factions in the Northern Baptist Convention sensed that their 1922 annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, would determine the future of the denomination. The modernists had clearly been on the ascent for more than a decade, but many in their number, including Fosdick, feared a reversal in Indianapolis. To pull it off, the fundamentalists would need an orthodox confession of faith.

Decline of Baptist Confessionalism

By this time, Baptists on both sides of the Atlantic had adopted written summaries of their beliefs for centuries. In America, the most popular confessions included the Philadelphia (1742) and Charleston Confessions (1767), both restatements of the Second London Confession (1689). The more moderately Calvinistic New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833) had also gained a wide following in the latter 20th century. There had always been some American Baptists who resisted the use of confessions on principle—especially those who had suffered under a state-enforced creed at the hands of some established church. But for many Baptists, written confessions were a standard feature of church and associational life, and provided a host of practical benefits.

Curtis Lee Laws attempted to educate the readers of the Watchman and Observer on the Baptist confessional heritage in 1921. “From

“Two distinct visions of Baptist identity had clearly emerged, one rooted in historic orthodoxy, the other in a highly individualistic doctrine of soul liberty. In the Northern Baptist Convention, only one could endure.”

time to time our Baptist fathers put forth confessions of faith, thus declaring and defining their principles,” Laws explained. In years past, Baptists had used confessions not as “creeds to which they demanded allegiance, but standards about which they might rally.” Baptist confessions were never meant to supplant the Bible, but to faithfully summarize its contents for instruction, for evangelism, for a bulwark against error and heresy. Laws, speaking for his fellow fundamentalists, called for a confessional renewal in the NBC. The time had come, he declared, “when Baptists should once again announce to the world their beliefs, when a standard should be raised.”

Of course, Laws knew that his proposal was controversial. Denominational modernists scorned the old confessions as useless relics. Generally speaking, they emphasized a universal religious experience over precise doctrinal formulations. Furthermore, the specific doctrines which the old creeds asserted were an embarrassment to modern men and women—either ridiculous (as with the virgin birth of Christ), or morally repugnant (as was the case with his penal substitutionary atonement).

In this progressive age, Baptist modernists gravitated toward the practical religion of the Social Gospel (promulgated by northern Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch) and the ecumenical impulses that gave rise to the Federal Council of Churches (1908) and the Interchurch World Movement (1918). Within this milieu, the dogmatism of the fundamentalists seemed rigid, mean-spirited, and just plain backward.

Two New Visions of Baptist Identity

Along with these common objections to confessions, Baptist modernists now frequently raised the issue of “soul liberty.” Since the days of Thomas Helwys and Roger Williams, Baptists had championed the sacred right of the individual to believe and to worship according to his or her own conscience, without interference

from any coercive religious authority. After all, each man and woman must stand alone on the day of judgment, and acts of faith must be voluntary to be genuine. These deeply held convictions regarding “soul liberty” had compelled early American Baptists like Isaac Backus and John Leland to fight against the establishment of a state church, and for the free exercise of religion, as basic human rights.

By the 1920s, modernist Baptists were increasingly enlisting this heritage of soul liberty in their arguments against confessionalism. To require belief in any extra-biblical confession of faith, they argued, constituted the same religious coercion against which their Baptist fathers had contended.

Historian Barry Hankins recently pointed to Crozer Seminary president Milton H. Evans as an illustration. In 1921, fundamentalists attempted to oust liberal church history professor Henry C. Vedder from the Crozer faculty (Vedder had brazenly declared that “The whole ‘plan of salvation’ of the orthodox theology seemed a tissue of intellectual absurdities and ethical impossibilities.”). Yet Evans scoffed at fundamentalists who attempted to hold Vedder accountable to a confession of faith. “There can be no such thing as a heresy trial in the Baptist denomination,” he declared, for, unlike the Presbyterians, Baptists “have no authorized or standard confession of faith.” The rejection of creedalism in the name of individual soul liberty, he argued, was at the heart of Baptist identity.

Curtis Lee Laws would have none of it. “We desire here to declare that this matter of soul liberty is being tremendously overworked by some who reject the very principles of those who died to make soul liberty the heritage of our age,” Laws wrote. “Originally this principle guaranteed to men the right to worship God as they pleased. It emphasized the fact that in the Christian economy no man or group of men could exercise authority over the conscience of the humblest man on earth.”

Pitting soul liberty against orthodox theology betrayed the Baptist heritage, he argued. “Our Baptist fathers had

a very clearly defined system of truth, and this was put forth in many noble confessions of faith.They knew of no soul liberty which guaranteed to members of Baptist churches the right to believe what they pleased.”

In the hands of the modernists, the cherished Baptist doctrine of soul liberty had undergone a major redefinition. Though Laws stood among the “moderate” wing of Baptist fundamentalists, he readied himself in 1921 to fight for confessionalism. “To reject fundamental Baptist principles and practices while remaining a member of a Baptist Church and to use the doctrine of soul liberty in extenuation of such a course is to pervert the doctrinaire and to make it a menace to the Church of Christ.”

Two distinct visions of Baptist identity had clearly emerged, one rooted in historic orthodoxy, the other in a highly individualistic doctrine of soul liberty. In the Northern Baptist Convention, only one could endure.

The Fundamentalist Federation, 1920–1922

In 1920, conservative Northern Baptists rallied from across the convention to form what they called a “Fundamentalist Federation” and strategize against the denomination’s doctrinal drift. The coalition included fundamentalists of both a “moderate” and “militant” variety. In the former group, leaders like Laws and J. C. Massee of Boston’s Tremont Temple Baptist Church hoped to recover orthodoxy in the convention and remain in fellowship with the modernists.

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

Harry Emerson Fosdick embodied the progressive journey of many northern Baptists in the early 20th century. After a traditional Baptist childhood, Fosdick attended Colgate College, where he encountered modernism under the liberal Baptist professor William Newton Clarke (Clarke recorded his own modernist transformation in Sixty Years with the Bible).

First under Clarke’s guidance, and then at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Fosdick exchanged the Baptist dogmatism of his youth for the classic liberal emphasis on personal religious experience. He then demonstrated his new doctrinal flexibility by accepting the pastorate of New York City’s First Presbyterian Church in 1918. From the prominent pulpit of “Old First,” Fosdick’s modernist message drew massive crowds. In spring 1922, with the showdown within the Northern Baptist Convention looming, Fosdick shook the American Protestant world by preaching “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”

Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969)

The more militant fundamentalists included Southern Seminary graduates John Roach Stratton, pastor of New York City’s Calvary Baptist Church, and William Bell Riley of First Baptist Church in Minneapolis; they wished to drive every modernist from the NBC like the Canaanites before Joshua. These different approaches would become glaring in subsequent years. But in 1921, they all shared the goal of adopting a Northern Baptist confession of faith.

Gathering before the 1921 Northern Baptist Convention in Des Moines, the Fundamentalist Federation produced a seven-point statement of their beliefs, drawing from the Philadelphia and New Hampshire confessions. Yet, perhaps for strategic reasons, they chose not to promote it at the convention meeting. This failure to act resulted in a clear modernist victory. Afterward, the fundamentalists vowed to recapture their denomination at the next year’s meeting. This is when Fosdick entered the story.

Seeking a biblical analogy for the controversy, Fosdick turned to Acts 5, where the insurgent Christian movement had run afoul of the angry Jewish establishment. Fosdick naturally cast his own modernist party in the role of Peter and John, leaving the fundamentalists to play the Pharisees: cranky, obstructionist, and obsessed with doctrine. The fundamentalists “insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles,” Fosdick complained, singling out the virgin birth, an inerrant Bible, Christ’s atonement, and his literal return at the end of history. By requiring allegiance to these hidebound ideas, fundamentalists endeavored “to mark a deadline of doctrine around the church” and repeated the sins of the church’s first enemies. Fosdick urged the fundamentalists to instead heed Gamaliel’s counsel of tolerance, patience, and an open heart to what could, in fact, be a great new move of God.

Fosdick claimed that he intended to promote peace and tolerance with his sermon. Instead, he inspired a flood of angry rejoinders, including Presbyterian Clarence E. Macartney’s famous “Shall Unbelief Win?” and Baptist John Roach Stratton’s “Shall the Funnymonkeyists Win?” Laws added an editorial of his own, entitled “Intolerant Liberalism.”

Fosdick’s smug tone and blatant rejection of traditional Christian theology had poured gas on the fundamentalist fire headed into the Northern Baptist

Convention. J. C. Massee declared that “Modernism and modernists must go,” as they had declared “warfare against supernaturalism.” Massee announced his intention to fill the NBC boards with conservative men and women. “It is my hope that we shall there serve notice on the denomination that we are no longer tolerant of the drift from the ancient moorings.” The stage was set for the 1922 Northern Baptist Convention.1

The 1922 Northern Baptist Convention

As delegates crowded into the Indianapolis convention hall on June 14, it did not take long for the confession issue to take center stage. Presiding over the gathering this year was Rochester’s Helen Barrett Montgomery. A Wellesley graduate, social reformer, and Greek scholar (she would in 1924 translate the whole New Testament, the first American woman known to do so), Montgomery was the first female president of any American Protestant denomination. She acknowledged in her opening address the tension in the room over a confession of faith and stressed that the Northern Baptist Convention had no authority to enforce a confession if it were adopted. “For us Baptists to have an official confession of faith would come perilously near to abandoning one of our fundamental principles,” she declared. Like many modernist Baptists, Montgomery viewed confessionalism as a contradiction of Baptist principles.

The fundamentalists did not take long to challenge Montgomery. Later that day, they offered a resolution to form a committee comprised of Northern, Canadian, and Southern Baptists. This committee would produce a basic statement of Baptist belief, explicitly to stand against the “notorious instances of false and subversive

teaching in certain of our schools and seminaries.” The recommendation set off a rowdy discussion in the hall, which ultimately went nowhere.

The critical turn came two days later, on June 16. Prominent pastor, evangelist, and conference organizer William Bell Riley had been frustrated by the previous year’s failure to bring a confession before the convention and determined not to repeat the same mistake this year. Riley moved that the convention adopt the New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833) as its official statement. Unfortunately for Riley, the modernists were ready with a perfect response.

Amid the tumult Riley’s recommendation provoked, Cornelius Woelfkin stood to speak. Woelfkin, pastor of John D. Rockefeller’s opulent Park Avenue Baptist Church in New York City, was a leading spokesman for northern Baptist liberalism. He offered a substitute motion: “That the Northern Baptist Convention affirm that the New Testament is the all-sufficient ground of faith and practice, and that we need no other.”

It was immediately clear that Riley had been outmaneuvered, for Woelfkin had forced Northern Baptists to choose between the New Hampshire Confession of Faith and the New Testament. “Baptists have never been strong on statements,” Woelfkin reminded his audience; they were Bible people. It was an oversimplification, but a compelling one, and exceedingly difficult for the fundamentalists to refute from the floor.

J. C. Massee tried. He reasoned with the delegates. Massee reminded the hall that Woelfkin and other liberal Baptists had happily affixed their names to various interdenominational confessions in the name of ecumenism; their stance today was inconsistent at best, and

Indianapolis, Indiana, in the 1920s. Site of the 1922 Northern Baptist Convention.

hypocritical at worst. Further, the modernists’ “Biblealone” message was empty rhetoric, for of course the Bible must be interpreted, as witnessed in Baptist Sunday schools, seminaries, and mission efforts. A sound confession would guard Baptists from wandering into heretical interpretations. But it was all in vain.

Massee’s logic could not withstand Woelfkin’s charming stories of learning the New Testament—not the New Hampshire Confession!—at his mother’s knee. After the floor called for the question, Montgomery prayed, and the convention voted to adopt Woelfkin’s resolution 1,264 to 637. Northern Baptists would have no confession.

Turning Point

Though overshadowed by Fosdick’s infamous sermon, the 1922 Northern Baptist Convention proved to be the turning point in the denomination’s Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy. Northern Baptist fundamentalists could never again muster the same united opposition against convention liberalism. The ranks of the Fundamentalist Federation divided, as Massee and other weary moderate fundamentalists urged a renewed focus on soul-winning rather than theological disputes. They began to distance themselves from their more aggressive brethren, seeking a path forward with the denomination’s modernist leadership. In subsequent years, efforts to hold missionaries and other leaders to the most basic standards of orthodoxy would be easily defeated.

Any lingering doubts about the modernist control of the Northern Baptist Convention were laid to rest in 1946. The aged William B. Riley led one final attempt to raise a confessional standard in the NBC, calling for a basic test of orthodoxy for all denominational officers. Instead, Northern Baptists overwhelmingly resolved, as they had in 1922, to “reaffirm our faith in the New Testament as a divinely inspired record, and therefore a trustworthy, authoritative, and all-sufficient rule of our faith and practice.” This time, even Riley got the message: Northern Baptists would have no confession. Riley finally resigned his membership in the NBC 1947 and died shortly thereafter.

Though Riley never could regain control of the NBC, his conservative doctrinal Christianity found wide success outside the denomination. He launched the alternative Baptist Bible Union in 1923, which later became the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches.

Popular audiences in the era also flocked to Fundamentalist Bible conferences, radio preaching ministries, and periodicals like the Sword of the Lord newspaper. And while they may have lost Colgate and Rochester Seminary, fundamentalism would flourish in a host of

independent Bible schools and major academic institutions like Wheaton College, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Bob Jones University; Riley himself founded the Northwestern Bible and Missionary Training School in Minneapolis. There, from his deathbed in 1947, Riley asked a young evangelist named Billy Graham to accept its presidency, bestowing his imprimatur on the next great fundamentalist leader. Graham accepted, but then forged his own path, emerging as the leader of a less separatistic “neo-evangelicalism” associated with Graham’s own evangelistic ministry, Christianity Today magazine, and Fuller Seminary.

Meanwhile, in the SBC

Southern Baptists followed a different course from their northern brethren, and the region’s cultural conservatism helped ensure a more limited audience for modernism. In the 1920s, Southern Baptists confronted the challenges of evolutionary science and liberal theology by adopting a new confession of their faith. Chairing the committee was E. Y. Mullins, the SBC’s leading theologian and the fourth president of Southern Seminary. Mullins, while relatively conservative himself, was also the person most responsible for elevating the doctrine of individual soul liberty among Southern Baptists, and thus was not particularly keen on Southern Baptists adopting a written confession.

When this could not be avoided, Mullins elected to lead the effort, steering Southern Baptists toward the broadest conservative statement possible, thus allowing for maximal diversity within the convention. Led by Mullins, Southern Baptists adopted the Baptist Faith and Message (1925) and avoided the convulsive fundamentalis–-modernist battles of the 1920s.

Under this wide doctrinal canopy, Southern Baptists grew into the nation’s largest Protestant denomination at mid-century. They found their unity in their vast denominational programs and institutions, even as fundamentalist and modernist elements within the convention grew further apart theologically. This continued for more than half a century past Fosdick’s notorious sermon and that fateful 1922 NBC meeting until, in 1979, doctrinal controversy finally descended on Southern Baptists. Near the heart of the debate was, of course, the old tension between confessional orthodoxy and individual soul freedom.

This time, however, the outcome would be different.

Eric C. Smith is associate professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and senior pastor of Sharon Baptist Church Savannah, TN.

by jeff robinson

six ways confessions promote church health

Particular Baptist churches planted in the tumultuous soil of 17th century England grew up and bore fruit under a nasty set of doctrinal and methodological accusations, including that they subscribed to libertarian free will, denied original sin, baptized women in the nude, and were opponents of church and crown.

PPerhaps their most virulent and colorful opponent, Daniel Featley—a separatist persecutor deluxe—derisively dismissed our Baptist forebears, writing in a

venom-filled pamphlet, “They pollute our rivers with their filthy washings.” Such was Baptist life under Charles I.

These nefarious charges and numerous others arose from leaders of the state church and led to decades of grinding persecution for Baptists. Seven churches returned fire, but not by brandishing the sword of steel or by hurling theological invectives. The seven carried out their war for truth by wielding the sword of the Spirit. The product was the most comprehensive expression of orthodox Baptist theology ever written—the Second

“MANY OF THE ENDURING CONFESSIONS IN CHURCH HISTORY HAVE AFFIRMED BIBLICAL TRUTHS WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CONDEMNING UNBIBLICAL EXPRESSIONS OF THE SAME.”

London Confession of 1689.

The signers of that venerable confession lived and moved in an age in which most local congregations wrote confessions of faith for a number of reasons, one of them to demonstrate their commitment to the historic Christian faith.

Additionally, they sought to manifest their solidarity with the prevailing forms of Calvinistic orthodoxy as well as to expound the basic elements of their ecclesiology. The Second London Confession also aimed at refuting popular notions associating Particular Baptists with the radical wing of the Anabaptist movement on the continent.

Of primary importance, they saw biblical warrant for the practice of confessionalism in texts such as 1 Timothy 3:16, where the apostle Paul’s inspired pen produced a brief but beautiful display of the mystery of godliness:

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.

Fast-forward to the equally tumultuous epoch of 2020, and many Baptist churches continue to have statements of faith “on the books” as a part of their foundational documents. Yet I’ve found that many churches do not know how useful the confession can be beyond establishing subscription to certain core doctrines.

This raises a fundamental question: How should a local church use its confession of faith? Here are six ways a church might use a confession of faith. I owe at least four of these to my friend Sam Waldron’s fine work, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (Evangelical Press). Confessions of faith should be used:

1. As an affirmation and defense of the truth. The church of the living God is called to be the pillar and

buttress of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). It is to “follow the pattern of sound words” (2 Tim. 1:13) and to “earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Insofar as a confession reflects the Word of God, it is useful for helping the church discern truth from error.

Many of the enduring confessions in church history have affirmed biblical truths while simultaneously condemning unbiblical expressions of the same. Paul called Timothy to guard the good deposit entrusted to him (2 Tim. 1:14), and likewise, faithful Christians are called to keep a close watch over it.

A part of this stewardship is clearly articulating the truth and defending it in the face of error. A more recent example of this is the Baptist Faith and Message (2000). Southern Baptists, rightly, revised their confession, adding article XVIII to address areas where feminism had begun to encroach on the church and Christian family.

Insofar as a confession reflects the Word of God, it is useful for helping the church discern truth from error.

2. As a baseline for church discipline. In 1 Timothy 5:16, Paul famously admonished Timothy to “keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” As a matter of stewardship, church purity, and love to neighbor, a faithful pastor, a faithful elder board, a faithful church member, must keep a close eye on the life and doctrine of those within their congregation.

Church discipline (Matt. 18:15-18) is a key part of this. The confession of faith forms the baseline for determining whether or not a church leader or member has strayed from orthodox belief or orthodox living. It provides an objective standard for both accusation and restoration in church discipline.

Andrew Fuller wrote of the care that must be taken in church discipline and the role of the confession in that pursuit:

“A SOLID AND EFFECTIVE LOCAL CHURCH CONFESSION TAKES AN UNAMBIGUOUS STAND ON DOCTRINES THAT SHOULD MARK THE GENUINE CHRISTIAN.”

If a religious community agrees to specify some leading principles which they consider as derived from the Word of God, and judge the belief of them to be necessary in order to any person’s becoming or continuing a member with them, it does not follow that those principles should be equally understood, or that all their brethren must have the same degree of knowledge, nor yet that they should understand and believe nothing else. The powers and capacities of different persons are various; one may comprehend more of the same truth than another, and have his views more enlarged by an exceedingly great variety of kindred ideas; and yet the substance of their belief may still be the same. The object of the articles is to keep at a distance, not those who are weak in the faith, but such as are his avowed enemies.

3. As a means of theological triage and Christian maturity. Which doctrines must be believed for one to be considered a genuine follower of Christ? Which doctrines represent denominational distinctives? Which doctrines are tertiary and may be relegated to the category of “good men disagree”?

A solid and effective local church confession takes an unambiguous stand on doctrines that should mark the genuine Christian. It also rings clear on denominational distinctives. But a wise and well-articulated church confession also avoids unnecessary sectarianism by refusing to take a hard line on so-called “third-tier” issues such as the timing of Christ’s return, specific details of the millennium, preferred English Bible translations, and those similar.

4. As a concise standard by which to evaluate ministers of the Word. The apostle Paul told Timothy to entrust the great truths of God to faithful men (2 Tim. 2:2). Faithful men are faithful to sound doctrine, faithful to the Scriptures. When calling a new pastor or a new elder,

the church’s confession provides the doctrinal standard by which his fitness is to be judged. It also provides a crucial baseline by which to measure his theological solidarity—or lack thereof—with the body that is considering him for ministry.

5. As a doctrinal basis for planting daughter churches. Churches typically speak of potential offspring as “having our DNA.” A confession of faith establishes a key part of the genetic structure that is to be passed on. As a historical example, the Charleston Association used a slightly revised version of the Philadelphia Confession as the doctrinal standard for church plants across the Southeast. My family remains involved in church in north Georgia planted by Charleston under the Philadelphia Confession in 1832.

6. As a means of establishing historical continuity and unity with other Christians. The framers of the Second London Confession aimed to show that Particular Baptists were not given to theological novelties but stood with two feet firmly planted in the historic Christian tradition. They subscribed to the Trinitarianism of the early creeds, the Christology of Chalcedon, the five solas of the Reformation, and much more that comprises evangelical orthodoxy. Local churches do the same when they proclaim where they stand on these core theological doctrines.

A healthy church is one that knows what it believes, preaches what it believes, teaches what it believes, sings what it believes, prays what it believes, confesses what it believes, and seeks, by God’s enabling grace, to live what it believes. In other words, a healthy church is a confessional church.

Jeff Robinson is director of news and information at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also a Ph.D. graduate from Southern Seminary and senior pastor of Christ Fellowship Baptist Church, Louisville, KY.

by joe harrod

a confessing people: a brief history of baptist confessions of faith

Baptists are a diverse people, and universal statements about Baptist beliefs are bound to be frustrated by one group or another, yet from their beginnings in the 17th century forward, Baptists have largely defined their beliefs in statements of faith and used such confessional statements to mark the boundaries of association, fellowship, and cooperation. This confessional impulse has marked General and Particular Baptists, Northern and Southern Baptists, and Baptist groups globally. Historian Tom Nettles identifies such confessionalism as one hallmark of Baptist identity.1

This article briefly surveys some of the more influential confessions of faith across the span of Baptist history to introduce some readers to these documents and to remind others of their importance. William Lumpkin’s Baptist Confessions of Faith is the key source for these documents, though many can be readily found online as well.2

England in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Baptists emerged in 17th century England among Puritan separatists who favored congregational autonomy over state control of the church. Many of these early separatist groups fled England for the Netherlands, where, in various instances, they became convinced that the ordinance of baptism was for believers, not infants.

John Smyth, an early separatist pastor whose theology and practice were ever changing, was a significant example of this tradition. Members of Smyth’s congregation eventually returned to England and gave rise to the “General” Baptist tradition, so named because of their belief in a general atonement, or the doctrine that Christ’s atoning death was available for all people.

At the same time, another group of separatists in London developed a different Baptist tradition. These “Particular” Baptists held Christ’s death was on behalf of the elect only; thus, their name emphasizes their belief in particular redemption. In somewhat simplistic terms, General Baptists tended toward the theological system of Arminianism whereas Particular Baptists were more Calvinistic.3

Both General and Particular Baptists wrote and used confessions of faith to define their congregations’ beliefs. John Smyth’s church in Amsterdam adopted A Short Confession of Faith (1610). This confession acknowledged God as Trinity and Christ’s divinity, denied

original sin, upheld a congregation’s authority over its own ministry and affairs, and offered hope in the resurrection from the dead.

As evidence of Smyth’s fluid theology, he and members of his congregation also signed A Short Confession of Faith (1610) before merging with a Mennonite group known as the Waterlanders. Some members of this congregation chose to remain independent from the Mennonites and, under the leadership of Thomas Helwys, articulated their beliefs in A Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland (1611). Within a year, this remnant returned to England and were the seed for later General Baptist congregations.

As congregations multiplied, in 1660 came A Brief Confession or Declaration of Faith that, within a few years, became known as The Standard Confession (1663). This confession, compiled by a general assembly of Baptists from across England, underwent revisions in the following decades but served as a unified statement of General Baptist theology during a time of governmental persecution. Before the century’s close, General Baptist churches in England’s Midlands region issued An Orthodox Creed (1678), which included a greater focus on the person of Christ than previous confessions to counter theological errors of the day. This confession was the only Baptist statement that integrated ancient Christian creeds (Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed).4 Particular Baptists in England were also busy writing confessions during the 17th century.

In 1616, Henry Jacob established a separatist congregation in London that would flourish and multiply throughout the rest of the century, even as its first two pastors fled persecution to the American colonies. Between 1640 and 1644, this single congregation had multiplied (amicably) into seven churches. In 1644, pastors from these seven Particular Baptist congregations in London wrote the London Confession, the earliest public expression of their doctrinal commitments.

This confession was apologetic and irenic as it defended the churches from false accusations of sedition and contained a robust presentation of historic Christian teaching while defending biblically the distinctive doctrines of a gathered church free from governmental control (Arts. 33–38), the lawful government of civil authorities (Arts. 47–53), and believer’s baptism (Arts. 39–40). The clarity, breadth, and richness of this confession is remarkable considering that all its signatories were

self-taught laymen. Baptists were not the only group writing confessions of faith in the 17th century. The Presbyterian theologians and pastors assembled at Westminster released their monumental Westminster Confession in 1646, and this confession helped shape subsequent Particular Baptist statements of faith.

During a time of renewed governmental hostility toward “Dissenting” groups, Particular Baptists used the Westminster Confession as the basis for a new confession of faith. Modifying its articles in several places (such as the ordinances, ecclesiology, worship, and civil authority), in 1677, these Baptists published the Second London Confession of Faith

In 1689, the first general assembly of Particular Baptists, consisting of members from over 100 congregations in England and Wales, revised this confession, which was now signed by dozens of pastors on behalf of their churches (the 1677 confession being anonymous). This confession was widely influential in England and the American colonies, and it continues to guide many Baptists today (although I’m confident that “1689” finger tattoos are a decidedly modern phenomenon).

Thus far, this article has devoted considerable space to the 17th century because this was the century in which distinctively Baptist congregations first emerged, and these congregations, though varied in theological affirmations, used the form of public confessions of faith to demonstrate the continuity of their doctrines with Christians who had come before and to explain and defend their practices against accusations of heresy or anti-government sentiments. The remainder of the article will focus on Baptist confessions in America during the 18th to 21st centuries to show that this confessional impulse remains an important hallmark of Baptist identity.

New England and the Old South Baptists began emigrating to the New World in the 17th century, though the earliest Baptist church in the colonies was founded by Roger Williams, a separatist, turned Congregationalist, turned Baptist (briefly), in 1638/39.

Unlike the situation in England, Baptists in the American colonies generally did not adopt confessions during the 17th century.5 In 1707, five Baptist churches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey founded the Philadelphia Baptist Association. In 1742, this association formally adopted the Second London Confession of 1689 with a few modifications that reflected the lingering influence of London father and son ministers Benjamin and Elias

Keach (hymn singing) as well as the influence of Welsh Baptists (imposition of hands). Known as The Philadelphia Confession, this Calvinistic confession proved tremendously influential to Baptist churches and associations, including the noteworthy Charleston (South Carolina) Baptist Association, which adopted the confession in 1767, though without the article on laying on of hands, which was more of a regional practice among Middle States Baptists.

The middle of the 18th century was a dramatic period of growth for Baptists in America but also a time of intense social and religious change as the series of revivals now known as the Great Awakening split churches among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, the latter dividing between pro-awakening “Separate” Baptists and “Regular” Baptists who had concerns about the movement. Many Separate Baptist groups were cold toward confessions, and their theology, while moderately Calvinistic, placed great emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s immediate and direct leading of believers.

It might be appropriate to describe Particular Baptists as holding an ethos more than a distinctive theology, which is one reason they did not write distinct confessions. By the end of the century, many Regular Baptist churches had absorbed Particular Baptist groups, leading to an interesting situation that sometimes required modifying Regular Baptist confessions or specifying that such confessions were nonbinding on every matter.6

One significant exception proved to be the influential Sandy Creek Association.

In mid-1740s Connecticut, Shubal (or Shubael) Stearns was converted under the preaching of the Anglican revivalist George Whitefield. During the 1750s, Stearns, Daniel Marshall, and their families moved to Virginia, and ultimately to North Carolina, where they established the Separate Baptist Sandy Creek Church. This congregation was a hub of energy, planting nearly three dozen churches in under 20 years. These churches made up the Sandy Creek Association, which had no formal confession of faith until the early 19th century. In 1816, the association adopted the ten-article Principles of Faith that was Calvinistic (Art. 4 on election and effectual calling demonstrates this bent) and upheld local-church autonomy (Arts. 6–7) and believer’s baptism (Art. 9).

In New England, New Hampshire played an important role in the development of Baptist confessions during the 19th century and beyond. During the time of the American Revolution, Arminian and Calvinistic

“CONFESSIONALISM PLAYED AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE FOUNDING OF THE CONVENTION’S FIRST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY.”

Baptist churches both existed in New Hampshire, when Benjamin Randall began his preaching ministry. Randall founded a Free Will Baptist Church in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1779. Before 1810, there were over 100 like-minded congregations spread across New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. In 1834, these Baptists published a confession that endured through the mid-20th century and that other Free Will Baptists in the South adapted and, with many revisions (most recently in 2016), continue to use today.

The Campbellite Movement of the 19th century challenged Baptist use of confessions. Alexander Campbell was a Scots-Irish immigrant and a Presbyterian who became a Baptist pastor in Pennsylvania. Campbell became convinced that a strict adherence to the New Testament required churches to forego the use of creeds and confessions (among many other changes in worship and practice).

He saw confessions as post-biblical innovations. A rallying cry of the movement was “No creed but the Bible.” Abandoning denominational labels, Campbell and other like-minded pastors were tremendously influential in spreading their vision of the primacy of Scripture, dividing many Baptist churches in the process. This movement gave rise to the Christian Church, Church of Christ, and Disciples of Christ movements and caused some Baptists to have lingering questions about the place of confessions and creeds.

In 1833, Calvinistic Baptists adopted The New Hampshire Confession. This statement took a more moderating tone from the Philadelphia Confession and earlier London confessions with regard to doctrines like God’s decrees, predestination, effectual calling, and the ability of sinners to respond to the gospel. New Hampshire condensed its statements regarding the nature and marks of the church, described only as local in the confession, to one article, among other changes. This statement had wide influence in New England, the Middle States, and even in the Southwest in the 19th and 20th centuries

and figured prominently in the Landmark Controversy among Baptists on the question of Baptist origins and the identity of the true church.

The Second London and Philadelphia confessions had clear statements on the universality of the church, that is, that the church was comprised of all elect persons, past, present, and future. In the mid-19th century, some Baptists like J. R. Graves and J. M. Pendleton challenged this doctrine of a universal church on the grounds that a New Testament church was a physical, observable, and local entity. In their view, Baptist churches were the only true church; thus other denominations were false churches with which no fellowship was possible.

The absence of any statement about the universal church in The New Hampshire Confession increased its usage among Baptists committed to a Landmark position across the United States. But this confession was also to have a particular influence upon the largest group of Baptists in America, the Southern Baptist Convention.

The 20th Century through Today

Baptists in the American north and south faced a host of challenges maintaining fellowship and unity during the 19th century, including competing visions of organization, missions, distance, identity, and of course, the challenge of slavery. In 1814, Baptists from the south and the north formed the Triennial Convention to support missionary work and ministerial education. By 1845, Baptists in the south broke from this project and formed the Southern Baptist Convention.

In the south, confessionalism played an important role in the founding of the convention’s first theological seminary, with the Abstract of Principles (1859) being required as a rule of faith for all faculty members at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This requirement led to the dismissal of C. H. Toy for views on the nature of Scripture that deviated from historic Christian teaching.

From the convention’s founding in 1845, the denom-

ination had no single statement of faith. During larger controversies of modernism and fundamentalism, messengers at the 1924 annual meeting approved the formation of a committee to prepare a formal statement of faith for the denomination. The committee, under the leadership of Southern Seminary president E. Y. Mullins (and including Southern Seminary church historian W. J. McGlothlin) began with The New Hampshire Confession of 1833, excluding some articles, editing other articles, and adding ten new articles to the document. The convention’s messengers adopted the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925.

By the early 1960s, the convention realized the need to revisit this confessional document, and a revised version was approved in 1963. In 1998, Southern Baptists revised their confession once again. Changes emphasized the revelatory nature and clarified the Christocentric focus of Scripture which had been added to the 1963 BF&M—though left open to a wide interpretation. Messengers approved the revisions at the 2000 annual meeting, a version that included articles on the family, the sanctify of life, and clarified biblical gender roles in the home and church.

African American Baptists have expressed diversity of opinion regarding confessions of faith. In 1895, three young African American conventions merged to form the National Baptist Convention. Debate over the autonomy of the convention’s publishing house in 1915 led to a split with two groups claiming the name “National Baptist Convention,” one being incorporated (the primary denomination) and one unincorporated (the publishing house). The National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. utilizes a slightly edited version of The New Hampshire Confession from 1853 as its Articles of Faith.7 The National Baptist Convention of America emerged as a separate convention from the publishing house controversy and has no statement of faith. The Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. formed in 1961 with an emphasis on religious freedom without government imposition. The PNBC has no formal statement of faith.

During the final decade of the 20th century, some Southern Baptists suggested that confessionalism represented a shift from historic Baptist principles. Some left the convention entirely, others formed the Southern Baptist Alliance (later renamed “Alliance of Baptists”), and still others formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF).

The CBF currently uses secular corporate language of “Core Values,” rather than “Confession,” to advance

four central ideas: soul freedom, Bible freedom, church freedom, and religious freedom.8 Grounded in several “Axioms” of E. Y. Mullins, each of these four values has linkages with many historic Baptist confessions. The Fellowship’s explanation for each value demonstrates a departure from longstanding Baptist faith and practice. Missing are values related to distinctively Christian teaching such as the Trinity, salvation, sin, resurrection, or the eternal state, or even a statement on baptism, which typifies historic Baptist confessions. Although internally consistent with the Fellowship’s view of soul freedom, the statement is distinct from the tradition of authentically Baptist witness.

Conclusion

Emerging from the Puritan separatists in England, Baptists in every generation, and from a variety of theological traditions, have articulated their beliefs in published confessions to show continuity with orthodox Christianity and to give witness to their distinctive ecclesiology and practice. Baptists have insisted that confessions are helpful summaries of the faith, guides to interpretation, open to revision, fallible documents, and nonbinding upon congregational autonomy—yet, despite their imperfections, confessions have been a vital part of Baptist life and will likely remain so.

Joe Harrod is associate professor of biblical spirituality and associate vice president for institutional effectiveness at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Notes

1. Tom Nettles, The Baptists: Key People Involved in Forming a Baptist Identity, Volume 1: Beginnings in Britain (Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2008), 46–48.

2. William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, rev. ed. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1969).

3. “Remonstrance” and “Reformed Orthodox” would be better terms that emphasize the shared theological commitments of movements rather than individual theologians, yet these terms are less well known.

4. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions, 296.

5. William J. McGlothlin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1911), 293. However, Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions, 349, n. 3, suggests at least two local congregations in Pennsylvania had published confessions by 1700.

6. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions, 353.

7. https://www.nationalbaptist.com/about-nbc/what-we-believe, accessed 12 August 2022.

8. https://cbf.net/who-we-are, accessed 11 August 2022.

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by stephen presley

how did the fathers use creeds?

I remember the first time I heard the song

“Creed” by the late great Rich Mullins. I was a young Baptist kid attending a Disciple Now weekend with my youth group. Rich showed up looking like a vagabond, barefoot and wearing a ratty white t-shirt. He played a nice set for our gathering, complete with his regular songs such as “Awesome God,” “If I stand,” “O God You Are My God,” and others. At one point, he sang “Creed.” I had very little

experience with the historic Christian creeds, and I remember thinking how strange and incredible the language sounded. Every word seemed precise and captured what I believed in a few succinct phrases.

The lyrics of “Creed” hung with me. I purchased the album and listened to the lyrics until I had them memorized. I am embarrassed to say that only later did I realize that I was actually memorizing the words of the Apostles’ Creed, one of the oldest confessions of faith.

This tapestry contains a single scene representing an article of the Apostles’ Creed, ca. 1550–1600

“DISCIPLESHIP, WORSHIP, AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE WERE FUSED WITH DOCTRINE AS THE CHURCH WORKED TO PASS ON THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS (JUDE 1:3). THUS, WHEN I CONSIDER THE PERFORMANCE OF CREEDS IN THE EARLY CHURCH, THEY USED THEM CATECHETICALLY, LITURGICALLY, AND APOLOGETICALLY.”

But that’s not all.

I also learned that the chorus—which runs, “I did not make it, no it is making me, this is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man”—it is not from Rich either. The lyrics are taken from the opening lines of G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Referring to his own personal faith, Chesterton writes, “I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.” For Chesterton, orthodoxy, or a basic confession of faith, is not something we create, but something that is recreating us.

These early confessions of faith uniting a popular 1990s CCM musician, a 20th-century British apologist, and a Baptist youth group exemplify the way confessions thread the Christian tradition. The church has always been and will always be a confessional people.

Looking back now, I can also see something else going on. The way Rich brings the creed into worship and his application of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy remind me of the different ways that the early church used creeds within their liturgical and spiritual lives. From its earliest days, the church formed a culture of confession. Discipleship, worship, and the spiritual life were fused with doctrine as the church worked to pass on the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). Thus, when I consider the performance of creeds in the early church, they used them catechetically, liturgically, and apologetically

Confessions and Catechesis

Catechesis, or discipleship, was the early Christian pro-

cess of preparing new members for baptism. Given that many of the new converts were coming out of paganism, the church was concerned about syncretism and hoped to preserve the purity of the church. This meant a longer period of discipleship for potential members and more intensive study of the basic doctrines of the faith.

In his catechetical manual On the Apostolic Preaching, the church father Irenaeus encourages Christians to hold fast to what he calls the “rule of faith.” Like the borders of an athletic field, the rule of faith formed the boundary markers for the church’s confession. The rule of faith typically follows a threefold structure, under the headings of Father, Son, and Spirit mentioned in Matthew 28:19. They added key divine attributes and activities under each heading that described their doctrine of God and the work of God throughout the history of salvation. Irenaeus’ account the rule of faith reads:

This then is the order of the rule of our faith, and the foundation of the building, and the stability of our conversation: God, the Father, not made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is the first point of our faith. The second point is: The Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying and according to the method of the dispensation of the Father: through whom all things were made; who also at the end of the times, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men,

visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third point is: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and the fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led forth into the way of righteousness; and who in the end of the times was poured out in a new way a upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man unto God.

Other early Christian texts, such as Cyril’s Catechetical Lectures or Augustine’s Enchiridion, use confessions like the Apostles’ Creed to explain the basic structure of the church’s faith. For the early church, there was no true discipleship without some training in confessions of faith.

Confessions and Liturgy

Alongside the catechetical use of confessions, there is a liturgical use. The early church’s liturgy, or the patterns of worship, uses confessions in all kinds of ways. In baptism, for example, early Christians would affirm a basic confession of faith. For the early church, baptism was not a spontaneous, unreflective event, but a time when a new believer stood before the community to proclaim a beautiful confession in the one true God.

The early Christian text On the Apostolic Teaching provides a good example. According to the text, a deacon would descend into the water and welcome the baptism candidate. He would then ask them three questions.

First, he would ask, “Do you believe in God the Father Almighty?”

Then, “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and died, and rose on the third day living from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, the one coming to judge the living and the dead?”

Finally, he asked, “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Church and the resurrection of the flesh?” Each time, the baptismal candidate would simply reply, “I believe.” As they proclaimed each question and answer together, the rest of the Christian community stood in agreement and confirmation of the good confession, welcoming each new believer into the family of God.

There are other ways that confessions were fused with worship, including prayers, songs, and public readings. All these liturgical acts unify the worshiping community around basic doctrinal convictions.

Confessions and Apologetics

Finally, confessions were used apologetically. As the early church grew and expanded, they always encountered new issues of heterodoxy. Some of these heretics include: the Gnostics who rejected the material world, Marcion, who believed the God of the Old Testament was wicked, Arius, who denied the deity of Christ, and Apollinaris, who denied Christ’s humanity. These heretical figures came in waves. As soon as the church dealt with one, another one rose to take his place.

In each case, theologians in the early church composed confessions to address heresy. Irenaeus, for example, composed a confession of faith that stressed God’s work of creation and the incarnation to deal with Gnosticism. Tertullian wrote against Marcion and emphasized the unity of the work of God throughout both Testaments. The Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon rejected the teachings of Arius, Apollinaris, and other Christological heresies. When the church needed to defend and clarify the faith, confessions served an apologetic purpose.

Conclusion

Confessions pervaded the life of the early church. It used them catechetically, liturgically, and apologetically. The early church would not know how to disciple new believers, perform acts of worship, or defend the faith apart from the use of confessions.

These uses are not all that different from the way confessions still function today. Rich Mullins, after all, taught me this. His music was simply carrying on a long tradition that fused confessions with the life and ministry of the church. I am grateful for this tradition that inspired Rich to take the words of an ancient creed and proclaim them to us. Together with Rich, Chesterton, and the early church, I affirm that “I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am, I did not make it, no it is making me, It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man.”

Stephen Presley is associate professor of church history and director of research doctoral studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

by raymond johnson

how do you cast a confessional vision in a non-confessional church?

“I agree with every word, but only Roman Catholics read creeds.” I was walking down the sidewalk with a member of our congregation, and we had just finished discussing why our church reads creeds and confessions during congregational worship. The issue was at once simple and decisive—our church should not read creeds during congregational worship because, according to the person with whom I was speaking, Baptists do not read creeds.

IHis sentiment isn’t novel. The purpose of creeds and confessions in the life of the modern church—in this case, Baptist churches—is the subject of much debate within evangelicalism today. Unfortunately, many churches fail to see the positive impact of creeds and confessions in the life of the local church and, in so doing, disregard them altogether. However, creeds and confessions bring unity to the church in both its orthodoxy and its orthopraxy, thus protecting the church from heterodoxy.

But how does a minister cast a confessional vision of church for a church that has never been confessional?

The Bible Drives the Change Confessions did not create the church; the Word of God created the church. Thus, evangelicals prioritize the preaching event in the life of the local church. Calvin would go so far as to say, “The church is built up solely by outward preaching…. By his word, God alone sanctifies [churches] to himself for lawful use.”1 The church is created and revitalized through the Word of God by the Spirit of God.

However, an emphasis on the expositional teaching of the Bible will naturally and organically result in a defined confessionalism. Biblical preaching guides a congregation to a defined confessionalism because terms like “Christ” and “church” carry with them massive theological import and doctrinal content. Christ’s identity is highly particular; it communicates something specific about what Jesus did for us and for our salvation (John 20:31; cf. Matt 1:17; 16:16). In the Apostles’ Creed, “church” appropriately precedes “the forgiveness of sins” because forgiveness of sins does not take place apart from the gospel the church preaches (John 20:19-23; Acts 2:38; cf. Isa. 33:14-24).

Christians must know something particular about Christ’s identity, about the nature of Christ’s church. Substantial revitalization in the life of the church best occurs with a renewed interest in expositional Bible preaching and a renewal of the church’s confessional life.

(Practical) Liturgy for Baptists

The idea of liturgy brings us back to our original question: “How does a minister cast a confessional vision of church for a church that has never been confessional?” Here is what it has looked like in the life of our church:

Our elders have led our congregation toward a weekly worship rhythm that integrates biblically reflective statements of tradition into the corporate worship of our local church. Each week our congregation has a time where we read from either our confession of faith2 or a creed aloud during corporate worship together.

Since our basic beliefs represent the foundational beliefs of Christianity, and because we are steadfast in our commitment to historic Christian orthodoxy, we consciously see ourselves as guided by widely accepted historic Christian statements of faith—the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.

When we read creeds and confessions and affirm our faith in this manner, it teaches our congregation that we join with all faithful believers across time and throughout the world today in confessing our faith to the glory of God. As the content of doctrine is repeated and taken in as what is true, the church is unified in its worship.

In terms of Christian worship, the Bible instructs us to fill our minds with the knowledge of God:

• “Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:13).

• “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3:2).

• “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:5).

The Bible tells us to fill and train our minds. The knowledge of God controls our minds so that we can think

“THINKING RIGHTLY ABOUT GOD CAUSES US TO FEEL RIGHTLY ABOUT GOD AND ACT RIGHTLY BEFORE GOD. THE USE OF CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS IN THE CHURCH TEACHES OUR CONGREGATION TO FILL THEIR MINDS WITH RIGHT THINKING ABOUT GOD.”

rightly about God. Thinking rightly about God causes us to feel rightly about God and act rightly before God.

The use of creeds and confessions in the church teaches our congregation to fill their minds with right thinking about God. Right thinking creates praise and adoration for the Creator. So, Carl Trueman states,

We go to church each week in part to be reminded by that Word which comes from outside of us who God is, what he has done, and what he will do. The corporate recitation of a creed forces us to engage in the positive action of ascribing to him that which is his: glories of his nature; the marvelous details of his actions; and the great promise of the future consummation of the kingdom. That is worship: giving to God what is his.3

Affirming sound words of Christian truth from creeds and confessions together unifies our congregation so that we can rightly praise the Creator together.

Pastoral Lessons Learned Along the Way

Though creeds and confessions can be read aloud on the Lord’s Day, reflected upon in small groups, and memorized by members, a minister must remember that casting a confessional vision of church for a church that has never been confessional requires patience. This awareness creates space for God to work as members learn to ask good questions of the Bible as well as about the doctrinal content the church ascribes to and teaches.

So when a member says, “I agree with every word, but only Roman Catholics read creeds,” or “I agree with every word, but I have no creed but the Bible,” it is the elders’

opportunity to help them see that it is not just Roman Catholics who use creeds but the church of Jesus Christ as she confesses “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3).

Or if a member says, “I agree with every word, but reading creeds is repetitive,” it is the elders’ opportunity to explain the value of catechizing as well as see this as an opportunity to avoid monotony by using a multitude of creeds and confessions that repeat the same truths in services of corporate worship. And confessing truth is always an act of worship.

And if some creeds—like the Athanasian Creed—are too long for any one worship service, the elders can divide the creed up to be read over the course of consecutive weeks (perhaps to be used during Advent or Lent).

Unfortunately, as a defined confessionalism emerges, some may leave. Others, however, will be drawn to the doctrinal content of Scripture. Therefore, as Wolfgang Capito urged his church when unsettled about the slow pace of reform, be calm and “let the Word work on.”

Raymond Johnson serves as senior pastor of Christ Church West Chester in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in New Testament from Southern Seminary. Raymond and his wife, Meghan, have five children.

Notes

1. John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion, IV.1.5.

2. The New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833, adapted).

3. Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 156.

by jeff robinson

how narrow should a confession be?

I did a double-take when I read the sign in front of a small, white church beside a twolane blacktop that snaked through the hills of western North Carolina. I stopped and backed up my SUV to get a second look. The weathered 12’-by-18’ sign read: “Welcome to Trinity Baptist Church. We are an Independent, Bible-believing, Trinitarian,

KJV-only, amillennial, evangelistic congregation.”

Two things on the sign captured my attention: “KJVonly” and “amillennial.” The Bible translation didn’t surprise me much, but I’m more accustomed to churches affirming the KJV alongside some form of premillennialism, so the amill affirmation took me back a little.

But that church’s sign does raise an important

question for confessional Christians: Which doctrines should be included in a church’s or evangelical organization’s confession of faith?

Theological Triage

In Albert Mohler’s helpful scheme of theological triage, issues such as eschatology or church music are thirdlevel doctrines on which good Christians may disagree and (typically) still be considered not only orthodox, but part of the same denomination or church in good standing. Mohler led the school back to its confessional roots in the 1990s after it had fallen into theological liberalism in the mid-20th century.

While Christians should never approach any doctrine with anything less than full seriousness, Mohler establishes three orders of doctrines that are helpful in establishing confessional non-negotiables.

First-order doctrines represent the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith, and a denial of these doctrines represents nothing less than an eventual denial of Christianity itself…. The set of second-order doctrines is distinguished from the first-order set by the fact that believing Christians may disagree on the second-order issues, though this disagreement will create significant boundaries between believers.… Third-order issues are doctrines over which Christians may disagree and remain in close fellowship, even within local congregations. I would put most debates over eschatology, for example, in this category.

EFCA and Premillennialism

In the summer of 2019, the Evangelical Free Church in America (EFCA) provided an important illustration as to how a denomination deals with confessional issues when 79 percent of delegates to biennial meeting of the EFCA voted in favor of a motion to amend Article 9 of the denomination’s Statement of Faith. Previously, Article 9 affirmed premillennialism as the exclusive view on the timing of Christ’s return. Formerly the article read, “We believe in the personal, bodily, and premillennial return of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Members voted to replace “premillennial” with “glorious,” thus avoiding narrow subscription to a millennial view.

Was this a positive move in favor of healthy confessionalism or a capitulation?

How should confessional Christians stay out of the opposite ditches of making either everything or nothing a first-order issue?

The EFCA first proposed the change during its 2017 meeting. The Board of Directors, composed of leaders who affirm the Statement of Faith, including premillennialism, presented the motion to the assembly. EFCA leaders believed requiring members to subscribe to premillennialism conflicted with a higher core value of Christians uniting around the truths of the gospel. The length of the millennium and the timing of Christ’s return simply were not theological lines EFCA leaders thought should be drawn. For this, they should be applauded. I say this as a confessional Baptist, firmly committed to the Second London Confession of 1689.

Two Extremes

Two extremes ought to be avoided when discussing theological triage and confessional statements. Fundamentalism tends to operate as if every theological issue is of first importance and, therefore, no second-and third-order issues exist. Theological liberalism, meanwhile, tends to operate as if no first-order issues exist. So how should confessional Christians stay out of the opposite ditches of making either everything or nothing a first-order issue?

Here are three questions we might ask to determine whether to include non-fundamental issues in a confession of faith.

1. Have the major historical confessions addressed it?

The best of the historical statements of faith, particularly in the Reformed tradition, have not typically included third-level doctrines such as the millennium and the timing of Christ’s return. Architects of both the Second London Confession of 1689 and its Presbyterian cousin, the venerable Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), included articles on the reality of final judgment and the truthfulness of Christ’s return, but not the timing or the millennium.

Chapter 32 (“The Last Judgment”) in the Second London Confession begins: “God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness, by Jesus Christ.” The second paragraph reads: “The end of God’s appointing this day, is for the manifestation of the glory of his mercy, in the eternal salvation of the elect; and of his justice, in the eternal damnation of the reprobate, who are wicked and disobedient.” Chapter 33 of the

WCF words it the same way.

The Baptist Faith and Message (2000) deals with “Last Things” in chapter 20: “According to his promise, Jesus will return personally and visibly in glory to the earth.” Others such as the Belgic Confession deal with the last things similarly.

The major confessions among Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists (as well as the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles) have included mainly first- and second-order issues: all doctrines germane to orthodox Christianity and the gospel such as justification by faith, the person and work of Christ, the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the resurrection of Christ, along with denominational distinctives such as church government, baptism, and the sacraments (or ordinances).

Congregationalists in England published the Savoy Declaration in 1658, and British Calvinistic Baptists drew up the Second London Confession three decades later with the specific intent of demonstrating that neither was a dangerous, heretical sect; both affirmed the same orthodox, evangelical theology as the Westminster divines. Baptists and Congregationalists, among others, were being persecuted as heretics and seditionists by the state-run church.

Churches and organizations have penned many other excellent confessions in the centuries following the Reformation; almost none of them has demanded specific views on third-level issues such as the millennium or the timing of Jesus’ return—for good reason.

2. Does demanding subscription to this doctrine needlessly divide Christians? If nothing else, the EFCA’s move is commendable because it aimed to avoid dividing good Christians needlessly. The board made clear that the EFCA was not pressing for relational unity at the cost of doctrinal purity. Greg Strand, EFCA executive director of theology and credentialing, assured members the revision did not represent a drift toward theological minimalism:

There are three issues in the question. First, it is never one over against another. Doctrinal truth and purity is always foundational to relational unity. Any true experienced unity is grounded in doctrinal truth. Second, this is not a matter of doctrinal minimalism. If it were, many biblical truths would not be included and necessary to affirm in our Statement of Faith. The better way

to understand our Statement of Faith is that it is an essentialist statement, not a minimalist statement. This is also why it is necessary for all those credentialed to affirm the Statement of Faith “without mental reservation.” That means we are strict subscriptionists. It is required to affirm the complete Statement of Faith “without mental reservation.” There is no good-faith subscription allowed, which would grant certain exceptions or caveats in belief as long as they are approved. Finally, in the EFCA we take seriously the one new community God creates through his Son by the Spirit. This is experiencing and living out the truth and reality of the work of Christ…. It is a unity centered on the truth of the gospel, even if and when there are differences on secondary and tertiary matters.

I once spent several months as a candidate for the office of senior pastor in a church in the Deep South. I went through three rounds of interviews, including one for which I traveled for a face-to-face session. I wrote answers to theological and practical questions that totaled nearly 40 pages. The committee also interviewed my wife extensively. Numerous phone calls went back and forth between the chairman and me. I probably invested well more than 100 hours in the process, and it became clear that I was the leading candidate.

Toward the end, the search committee scheduled a weekend on which my family would meet the congregation, participate in a battery of meetings, and then I’d preach on Sunday in view of a call to pastor the church. Unfortunately, my candidacy ended abruptly when the committee learned that I didn’t subscribe to the very specific details of their view of the timing of Jesus’ return, which was included in a sub-appendix (which I hadn’t seen) to the church’s confession.

I wasn’t bothered so much by the fact that they didn’t call me as pastor; obviously, it wasn’t God’s will. I did, however, believe this confessional item was unwise and divided brothers needlessly. An evangelical confession should avoid that mistake. My current elder board includes men with a variety of views on issues such as the end times, church music styles, and Bible translations—and we’ve never experienced division over it. Consciously reject the Trinity, and you’re not a Christian. Reject believer’s baptism, and you’ll need to join another denomination. Reject my view of the millennium, and

we can serve on the elder board together.

“THE BETTER WAY TO UNDERSTAND OUR STATEMENT OF FAITH IS THAT IT IS AN ESSENTIALIST STATEMENT, NOT A MINIMALIST STATEMENT.”

A church or denomination’s confession should affirm all the cardinal doctrines that define orthodox Christianity and important second-order issues that make up denominational or church distinctives such as baptism, the sacraments (or ordinances), issues related to complementarianism/egalitarianism, and church polity.

3. Is it related to an issue that demands the church speak prophetically? There are legitimate occasions that call Christians to speak prophetically by narrowing— often by adding to or clarifying—their confession of faith.

For example, in the late 1990s, rising feminism and the broader culture’s attack on marriage prompted the Southern Baptist Convention to adopt articles on male headship and the sanctity of biblical marriage and to add them to the Baptist Faith and Message

In 2008, the EFCA revised its article on the doctrine of God to reaffirm God’s exhaustive knowledge and the reality of God’s wrath—old orthodox truths that were being challenged by open theism.

The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 spoke to such issues as “Of the Mass,” “Of the Marriage of Priests,” “Of Confession,” and “Of the Distinction of Meats.” Similarly, Article 22 of the Thirty-Nine Articles rejects the doctrine of purgatory. Centuries later, these may seem like tertiary issues, but they were of massive consequence and strident debate amid the early decades of the Reformation. Churches need to declare their colors on those matters.

Christian organizations often adopt confessions of faith to directly address burning issues in the culture, as was the case with the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood when it published the Danvers Statement on gender roles in 1987 and, more recently, the Nashville

Statement affirming biblical sexuality.

Historically, the tendency to include premillennialism in mid-20th-century evangelical confessions came in response to the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy. Premillennialism served as a badge of membership for conservative evangelicals over against amillennialism, which was perceived at the time as a view that signaled theological liberalism. Since then this perception, and thus the level of urgency, has changed.

If a church, denomination, or Christian organization needs to offer clarity or speak prophetically, then adding or revising articles is valid, even necessary. There are times when a non-first-order issue, such as egalitarianism/complementarianism, rises to a level of importance that it must be dealt with confessionally. In other words, our triage chart on second- and third-level issues may change as circumstances such as cultural pressure and theological debates demand.

Guardrails

I’m thankful to have been a part of confessional Reformed Christianity for many years now, and I want to do everything I can to nurture it. But I don’t want to define membership by millennial views or Bible translation preferences.

Confessions of faith should function as guardrails— as narrow as Scripture is on a given issue—not a straitjacket.

Jeff Robinson is director of news and information at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also a PhD graduate from Southern Seminary and senior pastor of Christ Fellowship Baptist Church, Louisville, KY.

by jeff robinson

SEMINARY WIVES INSTITUTE

y25 Years of God’s Faithfulness

In February of 1997, Mary Mohler met with a few wives of Southern Seminary faculty members to share a burden and a vision that wives of seminary students needed to be encouraged and trained, and in the fall of that year, Seminary Wives Institute (SWI) was born.

Many student wives had requested training to help them prepare for the important role they play in supporting their husbands’ ministries in the local church, the mission field, and in other ministry venues. Mary Mohler and the group of faculty wives assembled a curriculum and began classes they hoped would meet the needs.

“We started SWI as a program to equip student wives here on our campus for preparation alongside their husbands,” Mohler said. “We believe when God calls a man to ministry, he also calls his wife to a very important

role, and the time when they are together here at seminary is the perfect time for her to receive training at the same time he does.”

Tanya York, a longtime SWI faculty member and wife of Theology School Dean Hershael York, attended that initial meeting and has watched SWI grow into one of the seminary’s most vital and cherished ministries.

“Mary shared with us a passion, a burden, and a vision,” York said. “Mary’s passion very quickly spilled over to a willing group of participants from within Southern’s faculty wives as they joined her in investing in educating and equipping student wives in the service of the kingdom.

“God has used this incredible and fruitful ministry to equip, fuel, and inspire hearts, homes, churches, ministries and lives in general.”

Hershael York, who teaches theology at SWI, said

“Getting to see the professors that my husband was studying under and getting to hear about the practical ministry experiences of ministry and faculty wives, I saw the value of it immediately. It has been good for our marriage and has been great for preparing and equipping us to go out and serve together as a team. It’s a unique opportunity and an invaluable resource to us here at Southern. It’s a great way to be able to support our husbands and be a team as we work together to serve the local church.”

“I know this is the best investment I can make. I’ve never left the classroom empty, but I’ve always been motivated to go and tell others what I’ve learned. I’ve always been challenged by the things the professors said. They’ve taught me how to be a better wife, a better mom. I was a teacher for 10 years and worked as a volunteer, and I was worried that I’m not giving anything back, but in SWI I’m learning now how to serve my husband and my baby—it’s a mission for them first. SWI has helped me to feel that I am giving, even when I’m at home.”

“When Hershael was in seminary, there was nothing for wives. There was one professor’s wife who did one class and met with us for a couple of hours and encouraged us. When we came to Southern, it was always on my brain that there was something that was lacking for students’ wives, there’s got to be more. Thankfully, Mary Mohler had already had this passion, this vision that was already in place. Through her passion and through her desire and design for student wives, it caught on with the professors and the professors’ wives. We began loving on these student wives and teaching them very practical things for ministry.”

LAURA JUVINALL from Wisconsin.

MARIA ABOU ASSALY from Lebanon.

TANYA YORK longtime SWI teacher and leader.

male students often stop and extol the incredible impact and encouragement SWI is having on their wives.

“Our admiration for Mary is off the charts,” Hershael York said. “We owe her so much. She has had such a profound impact. It’s a wonderful thing to see the way her vision has affected these families and shaped them forever.”

That first class 25 years ago numbered 136 students; thousands of wives have taken classes in the years since, and many have received certificates for completing the program. SWI has now trained an entire generation of ministry wives.

“I was the mother of preschoolers then and now I’m the grandmother of preschoolers, so truly an entire generation has elapsed,” Mohler said.

“We started this program due to the demand on campus here from student wives who were in a very friendly way asking for instruction that was tailored to them as they prepared for ministry alongside their husbands. The Lord has blessed it beyond any expectation we ever had, and he continues to do so.”

Tanya York said Mary Mohler’s ministry through SWI extends far beyond merely a list of names on class rolls. For SWI’s founder, each student is a dear sister in the Lord.

“Mary knows these students by name, she knows their churches, she knows their children, she knows their ministry, she knows their pets, she knows their favorite beverages,” Tanya York said. “She truly loves them, and they are forever stored in her heart and in her mind.”

SWI began with a meeting and a vision and today is one of the most cherished and vital parts of Southern Seminary’s ministry to its students. Mary Mohler deflected all credit; “God alone has built the ministry,” she said. Numerous faculty members and faculty wives teach in SWI, with classes ranging from hospitality and public speaking to evangelism, theology, church history, and much more.

“All I can say is, ‘to God be all the glory,’” she said. “This not at all a Mary Mohler effort; this is something the Lord did put on my heart in 1997. But then he also sovereignly brought alongside me a phenomenal group of faculty wives, such that a program like this doesn’t exist anywhere else on the planet.

“The seminary faculty also gladly gives their time in addition to full schedules to teach our student wives, and this is priceless. I am astounded and truly grateful for how the Lord has chosen to use SWI to his glory for 25 years.”

news & features

“the bible is the curriculum,” mohler says in annual fall convocation address

By Jeff Robinson

The curriculum at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College is not about the Bible or things related to the Bible; it is the Bible, seminary president Albert Mohler told students and faculty Tuesday morning in the school’s annual fall convocation at Alumni Memorial Chapel.

Preaching from 2 Peter 1, focusing on verse 19, where Peter, having spoken in previous verses of the transfiguration of Jesus which he witnessed, said of Scripture, “we have something more sure to which you do well to pay attention,” Mohler said God’s Word must saturate the curriculum at a faithful seminary.

“This is a call to attentiveness to Scripture in all of life,” Mohler

said in his 30th fall convocation address. “But let’s face it, as much as it is about all of life, here we are in this hour, in this place, asking God’s blessing upon the task of Christian higher education and theological education. We are playing with fire, brothers and sisters. We are walking right up to the edge of the precipice and looking down.”

Mohler said that if the Bible is the authority of all authorities for

the follower of Christ, if it is, as Martin Luther put it, “the norm above norms that can’t be normed,” then the subject matter that Southern Seminary and Boyce College are called to build everything upon rings clear.

“It’s about Scripture saturating everything we do and everything we learn and everything we teach in such a way that we are doing well to pay attention to the Word.”

During the service, three SBTS and Boyce College professors signed the Abstract of Principles, the seminary’s historic confession of faith: Tyler A. Flatt, associate professor of humanities at Boyce College, Justin A. Irving, Duke K. McCall Professor of Christian Leadership, and Abraham Kuruvilla, Carl E. Bates Professor of Preaching. Irving and Kuruvilla were installed into these respective endowed chairs.

Mohler introduced seven new faculty members: William R. Bishop, associate professor of church

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Boyce College professor Tyler Flatt signs the Abstract of Principles.

SBTS oresident Albert Mohler in his 30th fall convocation address.

music and worship; Mitchell L. Chase, associate professor of biblical studies; J. T. English, associate professor of Christian Theology; Kaspars Ozolins, associate professor of Old Testament interpretation; Jimmy H. Scroggins, professor of Christian ministry; Curtis W. Solomon, assistant professor of biblical counseling at Boyce College; and Daniel J. Stevens, assistant professor of New Testament interpretation at Boyce College.

The seminary also welcomed six new members of its trustee board: Margaret G. Beachy of Crestwood, Kentucky, Glen W. Braswell of Lancaster, Kentucky, Tamara J. Buck of Conway, Arkansas, Stephen A. Jones of Highland, California, Mark A. Jordan of Louisville, Kentucky, and Courtney D. Reissig of Little Rock, Arkansas.

sbts installs new bgs dean and provost in historic father-son succession

By Jeff Robinson

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary installed new leaders in two of the school’s most important offices this week in separate ceremonies in Alumni Memorial Chapel, with the provost appointment making Southern Baptist history.

Jeremy Pierre was installed as dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Ministry in a chapel service on August 30, and Paul Akin was installed as provost and senior vice president for academic administration of the seminary on Thursday morning.

Paul Akin’s appointment is historic: he follows in the footsteps

of his father, Daniel L. Akin, who served as provost at Southern Seminary from 1996 to 2004. They are the first father-son tandem in Southern Baptist Convention history to serve as provost of the same institution. Today, Daniel L. Akin is president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, an office for which he left Southern Seminary in 2004.

Seminary president Albert Mohler called it a “blessed continuity.

“There is nothing like this in Southern Baptist history,” Mohler said. “The only parallel to this I know is in the 18th and 19th centuries at Princeton Theological Seminary where there were fathers and sons that were serving in such similar capacities with names like Alexander and Hodge. This is glorious. One of the greatest joys of my life was to work with Dr. Danny Akin when he was the dean of the School of Theology and provost, because it wasn’t just a colleagueship; it was and is a very deep friendship.”

Daniel Akin preached in SBTS chapel Thursday during Paul Akin’s

installation service. Exhorting from Mark 10:35-45, Daniel Akin encouraged his son to remember that the call, opportunity, and ability to serve God are all gifts of grace. He warned Paul to guard against a sinful form of ambition that can ruin a man of God and destroy his calling.

“It’s all of grace that you have a special call on your life,” Daniel Akin said. “I want Paul to understand that the fact that God called him to this particular position at this particular moment is all of grace.

“And yet if you ever begin to think, ‘That is something I deserve. That is something I should have,’ let me tell you, ambition is a killer in the Christian life. There is such a thing as a holy ambition where you are longing with all of your being to honor and glorify God. I understand that, but I’ve lived for 45 years in ministry, and I’ve seen an unholy ambition grab the heart of those that at one time wanted to walk humbly before the Lord but now want to climb some pseudo-ladder of success, not to honor his name, but to build their own.”

Paul Akin (left) with his father, Danny Akin (center) praying, during the installation of his son as provost of Southern Seminary.

Both Pierre and Paul Akin had been serving in their respective offices since earlier this summer, prior to the formal installation. Pierre was named dean early last month after 20 years of teaching and serving in various other roles at Southern Seminary and Boyce College. Akin was announced as provost and senior vice president for academic administration in mid-June at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Anaheim. Previously, he was dean of the Graham School.

Pierre preached from Philippians 1:9-11 at his installation service, reminding students and faculty that a call to any role in ministry, is a call to become a servant.

“I am honored to assume this role that bears the name of Billy Graham,” Pierre said. “I am deeply grateful for his ministry and the legacy that is represented by that name. The school is about missions and evangelism and ministry and that is a high privilege.”

“I’ll let you in on a little secret about this role as the dean of the BGS. It’s the role of a servant; I serve the faculty, the faculty serves the students, so that you go out and serve churches locally and missions globally. We’re all servants, and I think we’re in good company in

claiming this because the apostle Paul, about his apostleship, said this same thing.”

annual

golf tournament raises $232,000 for sbts and boyce college students

By Travis Hearne

More than 110 golfers raised $232,000 for Southern Seminary and Boyce students at the 19th Annual Heritage Golf Classic Tournament on August 22 at Big Spring Country Club.

Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler voiced his gratitude

for the tournament and the excellent day for it. Temperatures were mild–in the low 80s–and weather the entire day was perfect for a golf tournament.

“What a spectacular day,” he said. “Golf is something I greatly admire, and I especially admire the fact that today you have transformed golf into a way of helping students at Southern Seminary prepare for ministry.”

Edward Heinze, vice president of Institutional Advancement, was thrilled with the number of participants—there were 112 golfers and numerous sponsors. The tournament raises money to help offset tuition for students at the seminary and Boyce College.

“Every year our donors turn out with big hearts and generous hands to help us keep our degree programs affordable for all of our students,” Heinze said. “Probably the most encouraging aspect of this tournament is the joy that accentuates the entire day—our donors are genuinely happy to participate.”

Alongside the money raised, Trevor Barylske, an MDiv student at SBTS, received the $5,000 Rick Bordas Scholarship.

The annual Heritage Golf Classic hosted by SBTS.

Jeremy Pierre was installed as dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Ministry during a fall semester chapel ceremony.

mohler’s new book unveils the explosive power of jesus’ parables

By Jeff Robinson

When Jesus’ disciples asked him why he sometimes taught in pithy stories known as parables, the Lord gave them a surprising, if not slightly shocking, answer: he taught in parables so that some would have their spiritual eyes opened to the truth of God’s kingdom and that others would have their hearts and minds blinded to it.

Such is the nature of those stories Jesus tells, which is, of course the outcome of engaging all of Scripture—some hearts are softened toward the kingdom, others are hardened.

In his new book Tell Me the Stories of Jesus: The Explosive Power of Jesus’ Parables (Thomas Nelson), Southern Seminary president R. Albert Mohler Jr. says in this way the parables “sneak up on Jesus’

hearers” with incredible power that makes clear truths about the kingdom of God.

In a little over 200 pages, Mohler examines many of the parables— most of which are found in the first three books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, and Luke—showing how they announce the arrival of God’s kingdom in all its glory, communicating both God’s grace in salvation to the found and his wrath in judgment to the lost.

“To be human is to be a storied creature in a way no other creature is,” Mohler said. “Dogs don’t know stories; they don’t tell stories; human beings tell stories—it’s a part of understanding who we are. Parents tell stories to their children and then those stories get repeated about the identity of a family. Churches and other organizations have stories.

“To be human is to have a story. To be human is to understand ultimate truth in terms of a story. The Bible is much more than a story, but it’s never less than a story. There is a

storyline that goes from Genesis to Revelation and there are stories in the Old Testament. Jesus perfected the use of parables in teaching, and they are particular kinds of stories; they are stories that sneak up on us, they are stories that explode and disclose truth in an unbelievable way.”

“treasure the old testament,” betts tells faculty and students in annual faculty address

By Travis Hearne

While many Christians wonder how the Old Testament remains relevant, believers should study, teach, and preach it because it is God’s Word and is vital for the Christian life, professor T. J. Betts urged in Southern Seminary’s annual Faculty Address held August 31 in Broadus Chapel.

“My hope is for my students to see the treasure that is the Old Testament and experience the joy of teaching and preaching it,” Betts said. “There’s one God, one Savior, one Bible, and one faith. The Old and New Testament testify to this truth.”

Betts offered six reasons for New Testament believers to study, teach, and preach the Old Testament. Betts serves as professor of Old Testament interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

1. The Old Testament is the Word of God. All Scripture is breathed out by God and carries divine authority. Betts noted that Jesus and the New Testament authors expanded on—rather than replacing—the inspired message of

President Mohler signs his new book on the parables of Jesus.

the law and prophets.

2. The Old Testament is God’s revelation of himself. From cover to cover, the Bible teaches that God wants us to know him through his Word, Betts pointed out.

3. The Old Testament speaks of and anticipates the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is the substance and center of the whole Old Testament. The motif of fall, judgment, and restoration comes to an eschatological climax when they will be executed by the Lord Jesus Christ, Betts said.

4. The Old Testament lays the foundation for the New Testament. While the New Testament applies the Old Testament in a variety of ways, the authors consistently believed Jesus is the promised messiah. They understood their relationship to the Old Testament as continued revelation, Betts argued.

5. The Old Testament gives wisdom for salvation. Believers often speak as if the gospel is first revealed in the New Testament. But Paul would beg to differ, Betts said.

6. The Old Testament provides

instruction for New Testament believers. The Old Testament remains relevant for addressing needs in the church today. Since everything written in Scripture is for our instruction, the New Testament authors never intended to nullify instruction from the Old Testament, Betts said.

boyce college launching cross-country team this fall

By Travis Hearne

Boyce College is expanding its athletic offerings this fall to include a cross-country team.

The addition of men’s and women’s cross-country will be the school’s fourth athletic program and testifies to significant growth within Boyce College athletics.

“The fielding of a cross-country program represents the next move for Boyce athletics,” said Dustin Bruce, Boyce College dean.

“With the growth of the sport among traditional high schools, smaller Christian school, and home school co-ops, cross-country is a natural fit for our constituency. Our current student athletes make a significant contribution to our student experience and campus culture, and I look forward to welcoming a new team into the Boyce athletics program.”

The team will have spots for up to ten men and ten women and plans to begin competition this fall.

The past year witnessed major success for Boyce athletics as the basketball team achieved a top-10 ranking in the NCCAA Division II, and the Boyce men’s soccer team made history by winning the school’s first regional championship. Adding the cross-country team is the next step in furthering Boyce’s success in the classroom and on the field.

Michael McCarty, athletic director at Boyce College, is excited for the new athletic offering that Boyce students will use to spread the gospel.

“Boyce Athletics is thankful to the trustees, Dr. Mohler, and Dr. Bruce for allowing us to add the men’s and women’s cross-country team this fall,” said McCarty.

“The cross-country team will give our students another exciting way to participate in intercollegiate sports while at Boyce College. The cross-country team will continue our mission of using Boyce athletics as a platform for ministry and the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in the lives of the student-athletes and those we meet while running. I am excited to see all the Boyce runners out competing this fall.”

Professor T. J. Betts delivered the annual faculty address in Broadus Chapel.

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

recent faculty books

40 Questions About Prayer Joseph C. Harrod Kregel Academic 2022 | $15.99

Praying is often the most common yet least understood practice of Christian spirituality. In 40 Questions About Prayer , scholar and teacher Joseph C. Harrod shares biblical insight on the nature and practice of Christian prayer. Harrod’s emphasis on searching the Scriptures results in a trustworthy, practical guide to a vital aspect of Christian belief and behavior, equally appropriate for seminary courses, Bible studies, and personal understanding.

Journey through the New Testament: Understanding the Purpose, Themes, and Practical Implications of Each New Testament Book of the Bible William F. Cook III Tyndale Momentum 2022 | $16.99

Journey through the New Testament helps you gain a complete understanding of the teachings of Jesus and how the early Christians thought and lived out their beliefs. It is a solid foundation of biblical knowledge on which you can build a deeper understanding of Scripture and God’s ultimate purposes.

Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands: Recovering Sacrament in the Baptist Tradition

Michael A.G. Haykin Lexham Press 2022 | $19.99

In Amidst Us Our Belovèd Stands , Michael A.G. Haykin argues that many Baptists, such as Charles Spurgeon and other Particular Baptists, stood closer to Reformed sacramental thought than most Baptists today. More than mere memorials, baptism and communion have spiritual implications that were celebrated by Baptists of the past in sermons and hymnody. Haykin calls for a renewal of sacramental life in churches today—Baptists can and should be sacramental.

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

recent faculty books

Tell Me the Stories of Jesus: The Explosive Power of Jesus’ Parables

R. Albert Mohler Jr. Thomas Nelson 2022 | $18.99

Jesus perfected the art of telling parables—short stories with a surprising twist and an explosive message that confronted his listeners with surprising (and often uncomfortable) truths about the human heart and the kingdom of heaven. But two thousand years later, modern readers may not grasp the cultural and historical context that made these stories so compelling for Jesus’ original audience. Mohler brings Jesus’ stories to life, uncovering the context and allowing readers to hear these stories in all their shocking, paradigm-shifting power.

Ruth: A Guide to Reading Biblical Hebrew Adam J. Howell

Lexham Academic 2022 | $32.99

Too often, a former Hebrew student is a lapsed Hebrew student. The paradigms, the syntactical forms, and even the alphabet can be hard to recall. The way to make Hebrew stick, like any language, is to continue to put it to use. In  Ruth: A Guide to Reading Biblical Hebrew , Adam J. Howell helps intermediate readers of Hebrew work through the text of Ruth with exegetical and syntactical aids. With Howell as a guide, students will be able to mine the riches of the Hebrew text to appreciate the literary and theological significance of the book of Ruth.

Grace & Truth Study Bible, NASB Edition

R. Albert Mohler Jr., General Editor Zondervan 2022 | $48.49

The Grace and Truth Study Bible is designed to help you understand and be formed by Scripture. Rich passage-by-passage study notes are theologically sound, guiding you to a deep understanding of each text, while always keeping in view the transformative affirmation and goodness of God’s nature and redemptive plan. The  NASB Grace and Truth Study Bible offers the translation celebrated for faithfulness to the original biblical languages in a portable, easy-to-read format.

by jarvis j . williams

gospel light shines

bright on my old eastern kentucky home

Most people know by now that on July 27, 2022, historic levels of rain fell on Southeastern Kentucky, taking the lives, homes, and livelihoods of many.

As an Eastern Kentucky native, born and raised in Red Fox, Kentucky, my heart continues to ache with much grief as I witness the magnitude of the loss and trauma that so many image bearers in the region continue to experience because of the flood.

Adding to this grief is the fact that some of the hardest hit areas in the region were in my native Knott County, where businesses, homes, churches, and entire communities are badly damaged or destroyed, and where the loss of life was the highest. Adding insult to injury is the fact that I personally know people who suffered some

degree of loss. As I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the flood, the financial, material, physical, and spiritual needs in Eastern Kentucky are immense.

Firsthand Witness

Since writing that article, I traveled with SBTS colleague Justin Irving to Knott County and witnessed the devastation firsthand. We also had the privilege and honor to take a financial gift from our church, Sojourn Midtown, as well as gift cards from many colleagues at Boyce College and Southern Seminary. We also took select items to help meet some of the material needs in the community. We were able to partner with my home church, Hindman First Baptist Church (HFBC), to help restore the

flood-damaged home of my mother in the faith, Ms. Ella Prater. During our short time there, we saw both the heartbreaking devastation in the community and the amazing and faithful work HFBC is doing to meet both the material and the spiritual needs in the community under the leadership of both Dr. Mike Caudill, senior pastor of HFBC—affectionately known by his parishioners and the community as Brother Mike—and with his wife, Alice Caudill. I was a member of HFBC from 1996 to 2001.

Brother Mike, an MDiv graduate of SBTS, has faithfully served HFBC for 34 years. During his ministry there, the gospel of Jesus Christ has spread like wildfire throughout many parts of Knott County, across Eastern Kentucky, and beyond as they have produced many disciples of Jesus Christ, disciples who have, by God’s grace, reproduced themselves across the region and across the globe.

In the flood’s immediate aftermath, HFBC—which averages around 150 to 200 in attendance each Sunday— served more than 9,000 meals to local residents, many of whom had lost everything. With the help of generosity from church members and volunteers across the state, HFBC served around 1,500 meals a day for several days following the flood.

In addition to working tirelessly to lead HFBC to meet the community’s physical needs, Brother Mike and Mrs. Caudill continue to serve alongside fellow members to take material goods to community residents who are unable to come to the church to receive them. Members of HFBC have also taken the love of Jesus and the light of the gospel message to specific communities in the area.

Preaching the gospel, teaching the gospel, applying the gospel, obeying the gospel, and serving the community in practical ways in the name of Christ because of a love for the gospel is nothing new for HFBC—as I have personally experienced.

Personal Journey:

Grace Germinates

Among the Weeds of Tragedy Since its inception, fervent gospel ministry has been the church’s mission and witness in the community. I experienced this ministry firsthand both before and after I became a Christian as a

17-year-old. Like many family members in my childhood and early teenage years, Brother Mike, Mrs. Caudill, the Prater family, and many of the saints at HFBC played a major role in saving my life.

As I was coming to the end of my senior year of high school in the spring of 1996, I had no direction, no purpose, no realistic goals. Worse, I didn’t know Jesus. Our community experienced a tragedy that changed the direction of my life forever and changed the lives of many young people and adults. A dear high school friend, Merri Kathryn Prater, a fellow senior and fellow athlete, was involved in a terrible car crash and suffered a severe brain injury. Merri Kathryn was a Christian, and her mother, Ella Prater, my senior English teacher, and Merri Kathryn’s father, Willie Prater (now with the Lord), were also Christians. The Praters were members at HFBC.

During her stay in the hospital after her accident at what was then known as the University of Kentucky Medical Center, several of her classmates and members from HFBC visited Merri Kathryn and sought to comfort and support the family. Brother Mike and numerous church members were a constant presence at the hospital. They showed their faith by loving, caring for, comforting, and weeping with the family. They also loved, comforted, and wept with many of us young people, who ranged in age from early teens to late teens; we quite simply couldn’t understand or handle the trauma of seeing a classmate and dear friend whom we loved and a family whom we loved going through this pain and potential loss.

Even as a non-Christian, I was amazed by the

Mike Caudill with Southern Seminary professors, Jarvis Williams and Justin Irving.

consistency with which Brother Mike, his wife, and the saints at HFBC shared the love of Jesus with the hundreds of young people at the hospital and with other supporters from the community who were there. I was taken by the compassion and love they showed the Prater family and concerned friends. I was also filled with wonder by the deep faith they demonstrated as they encouraged us young people to place our faith in Christ and to pray fervently for Merri Kathryn. In the foyer of the UK Medical Center in 1996 I, still an unbeliever, gathered in circles of intense prayer for my friend, sang hymns, and heard for the first time the famous hymn “Amazing Grace” as members of HFBC led in worship there.

Those moments shook me to the core of my being in deep and meaningful ways, and they changed me forever.

To my dismay, however, Merri Kathryn never gained consciousness, and she never left the hospital. On April 3, 1996, she went to be with Jesus. The funeral was held at HFBC. I was a pallbearer. Brother Mike preached a sermon called “Three Cheers and a Savior”—Merri Kathryn was both a Christian and a cheerleader.

That sermon and the entire service changed my life direction in every possible way.

Brother Mike preached the gospel clearly and beautifully celebrated Merri Kathryn’s life. Many friends, family members, and teammates spoke of Merri Kathryn with beauty and grace. Mrs. Prater eulogized her daughter with profound eloquence, supernatural strength, deep faith, and with the joy of the Lord in a manner that left us completely mesmerized.

Merri Kathryn’s funeral was filled with sorrowful joy and with lament, but not with despair, as the Prater family and HFBC’s saints grieved with gospel hope. I encountered the greatness of God for the first time at that funeral, as I heard Brother Mike preach the gospel with stunning clarity, and as I heard for the first time those words of the famous Rich Mullins song, now forever engraved on my soul as the choir and congregation sang: “Our God is an awesome God, he reigns in heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love, our God is an awesome God.” Merri Kathryn’s life—one so well lived— her friendship, her church (which eventually became my church), and her family (which eventually became my adopted spiritual family) truly saved my life.

The night Merri Kathryn died I received the sad news along with my baseball teammates after a game. My teammates and I, many of whom were not Christians, erupted with loud cries of lament, shock, devastation, and anger—at God. A teacher at my high school, also a member of HFBC, had attended the game. She came onto

the field, placed her hand on my shoulder as I groveled in the dirt near first base with anger, confusion, and uncontrollable pain, and she exhorted me: “Jarvis, you must put your hope and your faith in God.” Several of us heard that HFBC was open. Someone told us Brother Mike and other church members were willing to talk to us.

I joined a few teammates and some parents for the short drive from the baseball field to the church. There, one of my teammates, an underclassman and HFBC member, sat down beside me in a church pew, opened John 3:16, and read it aloud; he explained, “Jarvis, this is what life is all about.” Brother Mike likewise explained the gospel with great clarity to the young people and parents who had gathered there.

That night, one of my teammates, Mark Combs, gave his life to Jesus. He and I were good friends in high school, eventually became college roommates, and we attended Southern Seminary together. Pastor Mark is a two-time Southern Seminary graduate, and he currently serves as pastor of Summit Church in Hazard, Kentucky, a congregation he and his wife planted. Pastor Mark and Summit Church are likewise doing great work to help flood survivors in the region.

Grace Breaks Through

I didn’t give my life to Christ on the night Merri Kathryn died. But, on April 22, 1996, during a baseball game, I asked Brother Mike’s son, Casey, a teammate, if he would ask his father to give me a call because I wanted to talk to him about becoming a Christian. After our game that night, Brother Mike called, explained the gospel with great power, and led me to personal faith in Jesus Christ. Approximately two years later, Casey went to be with the Lord.

Shortly after my conversion, Brother Mike baptized me, and I became a member of HFBC. In the ensuing years, the body of HFBC walked with me through Christian discipleship and helped me discern a call to ministry. That body licensed me into the ministry, ordained me into the ministry, supported me financially so that I would be able to attend college and seminary, encouraged me spiritually, and walked with me in numerous joys and trials of life.

Brother Mike and HFBC ministered to and loved my family well, and multiple family members gave their lives to Christ because of the direct impact of Merri Kathryn, her family, Brother Mike, Mrs. Caudill, and the saints at HFBC. Brother Mike and Mrs. Caudill, the Prater family, and so many others at HFBC adopted me as their spiritual son.

I say it again: That body truly played a major role in saving my life!

The Light Still Burns Bright in Eastern Kentucky

So, as I have heard, read in the news, and seen firsthand how Brother Mike, Mrs. Caudill, and the saints at HFBC are responding with grace, love, compassion, mercy, and the hope of the gospel during this time of crisis in the region, I’m reminded that the gospel’s light continues to shine bright on my old Eastern Kentucky home through the ministry of HFBC and through the kindness and generosity of so many residents there.

It’s deeply gratifying to see the work that the Lord is doing through HFBC and to see the impact of the generosity and sacrifices of so many people from different parts of the country. However, neither they nor other churches in the area can do this work alone.

The path ahead for Knott County and for the rest of the Southeastern Kentucky region so devastated by the flood is long and difficult. Residents there will need help for many days, months, and years to come. There are myriad needs in the area because the devastation is so widespread. There are financial needs, educational needs, material needs, mental health needs, and a need for able-bodied people to help with physical labor.

Two of the most important material needs are money and workers to help with cleanup. There are also many spiritual needs.

Want to Help?

For members of our SBTS and Boyce College community who may be interested in helping, there are abundant opportunities to share the love of Christ as you show the love of Christ in the communities which the flood waters ravaged.

I respectfully ask members of our seminary community to consider prayerfully creative ways you and your churches can help the region over the long term. We can partner with trusted pastors in the region and travel to the area to help these pastors and their churches on the ground in the work of loving our neighbors as ourselves and sharing the love of Jesus. We can join with the many faithful churches there who continue to shine the bright light of the gospel on my old Eastern Kentucky home.

Jarvis J. Williams is associate professor of New Testament interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.