The previous post about Mohler and the postmoderns is a good illustration and expose (the issue , not my article about it) of the present Southern Baptist Convention leadership regarding how it’s moving faraway from Baptist distinctives. Mainly, the one which is considered by many Baptists to be THE numberone distinctive: the autonomy of the Church at a coprporate level, and the soul competency, religious freedom, and individual autonomy at rhe personal level. The trouble with the Mohler crew is that they don’t trust the Church, as represented by the aforementioned ideals. To them, it’s too dangerouse to rely upon sole competency. It might lead to an overthrow of their stranglehold on leadership. There might arise another Clarence Jordan or Gordon Cosby from a Southern Baptist Seminary to call into to question what it means to be Church.
If, as is suggested inthe previous post, that the SBC leadership wants to become a papal power, and tightly ploice what gets expressed as “Christian” and stongarm any “dissident” views, then such “radicals” like Jordan and Cosby and others can no longer be tolerated.
If religious and academic theological freedom were to be given free reign, then God just might ba able to raise up “malcontents” and send forth ministers who have heeded a call to address some specific need, one which may well lie outside the restricts of the arena called ministry by the present leadership.
They are, today, certainly something other than Baptist. I have no illusions about the fact that it was , to a large dgree, brought about by condescending behaviour toward the more conservative membership, and they were sick of it, and responded by rallying enough of the rank and file (although I consider it something of a PR campaign that set forth a “Biblical” apologetic that made palatable what methods they would use to achive a changeover in power, and once theygot it, it was house-cleaning time. There are faults on the moderate to liberal side, that they couldn’t maintain the kind of oneness in Christ that had ruled for decades.
It used to be a truly miraculous diversity enjoyed by Southern Baptists. When I was about to enter Seminary and was in College and heavily involved in Baptist Student Union, there was a kind of “division” of students along lines of “which seminary” they planned to attend. The much closer “Southern Baptist Theological Seminary” in Louisville was portrayed as the “liberal” seminary— actually, it too was diverse and contained a wide variety — and the much further Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (Ft Worth) was the place where the conservatives went (at least those who were repelled by the diveristy of Southern). The thing is, both groups lived and were active TOGETHER in the BSU there at Murray State University. Today, the boundaries are more carefully drawn. Some 7 years later, when I was interviewing and was accepted by a search committee for a Campus Ministry BSU director position, it was the Area Minister of the Southern Baptist, who was apparently of the “theological police” mentality (or amybe even under orders to “weed out liberals”) who questioned me on some peculiar theological postions that pulled the plug on that job poissibility. That was 1981, when all of this mess started to get rolling in earnest.
Once you stop trusting in the guidance of God and stand guard over Churches and her institutions, somehow I think God doesn’t like that too much if some of the Callings to which people respond are met with suspicion and not only do not get encouraged, but outright resisted and labeled heretical. I’m sure that The Church of the Savour would be under fire if Gordon Cosby had established that as a Southern Baptist Church, but he didn’t — I heard about them because of my own Youth Program and my Youth Minister in a Southern Baptist Church that did not play the policeman role, and it was there that I also heard about Clarence Jordan. Such “bad influences” which alerted me to the idea that what Christian Churches proclaim is not always the pure gospel.