EDITOR’S NOTE: Clint Bass (DPhil, Oxford) is a Baptist historian and member of Southern Hills Baptist Church, Bolivar, Mo.
Last February, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee deemed Saddleback Church a body “not in friendly cooperation with the convention.” As an attempt to contest the Executive Committee’s actions, Saddleback pastor Rick Warren published an open letter on 2 June. His basic claim is that Southern Baptists have lost their way in creedalism and this misstep has resulted in years of decline. His solution seems to be (1) eliminate confessions altogether as “We have no book but the Bible, and we have no creed but Christ,” or (2) if we must put up with them, do not expect church leaders to actually hold the articles, only the general tenor of the confession (whatever that is).
What about Warren’s accusation of creedalism? Are Baptists “creedal”? The answer is largely dependent upon what is meant by this rather imprecise term. If “creedal” is used to refer to those that view certain statements of faith as having the same authoritative status and quality as Scripture, then it is true — Baptists are certainly not creedal. There are some Christian traditions that regard certain creeds so highly that they function as stand-alone authorities. But this is not so for Baptists. Baptists have always understood that the value of a confession depends on how accurately its content is derived from Scripture. All editions of the Baptist Faith and Message have denied their own finality and infallibility, and this is in keeping with the history of Baptist confessions. In terms of elevating traditional documents to the status of Scripture, Baptists are undoubtedly not creedal.
Warren, however, employs this term as a slur suggesting that his opponents have moved in an unbaptistic direction. He imagines that Baptists of the past never expected doctrinal accountability to a declaration of faith. This is false. He rightfully acknowledges that Southern Baptists are a mix of people whose history reaches back to early seventeenth-century origins. Baptists were, in fact, born in a confessional era. They published numerous confessional statements unifying congregations into bodies that would form associations and denominations. Their confessions were used as instruments to enforce a level of doctrinal consensus by excluding those who would not affirm their articles of faith. Baptists relied on confessions to establish the boundaries of their various church bodies both for admission and exclusion. Such was long practiced by General Baptists and Particular Baptists. This is the established norm for Baptist life, and the preponderance of confessionalism among Baptists in America has been well-documented by Tom Nettles, Greg Wills, Timothy George, and others.
While there are instances of Baptist anti-confessionalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, they are departures from the norm. Such departures have often resulted in the dwindling of church life. For example, when eighteenth-century General Baptists abandoned confessions, they shrank and drifted into Unitarianism. Northern Baptists rejected confessionalism at their 1922 convention declaring that “the New Testament is the all-sufficient ground for our faith and practice, and we need no other statement.” They went on from there to experience a growth of liberalism in their seminaries, but little numerical gain from that point to today. Interestingly, though Southern Baptists were roughly the same size as Northern Baptists in the early twentieth century, Southern Baptists embraced confessionalism as a safeguard to liberalism and they saw tremendous increases throughout the century. Their confession, the Baptist Faith and Message, provided a strong sense of identity, clarifying that modernism was unwelcome among the churches. When controversy over the interpretation of Genesis erupted in the early 1960s, Southern Baptists revised this confession and, once again, established theological boundaries. The increase in doctrinal precision and accountability was accompanied by continued growth. Controversies over inerrancy, abortion, and women in ministry led to yet another revision of the Baptist Faith and Message in 2000. Again, the purpose was to clarify what was acceptable belief within the denomination.
Of course, when Southern Baptists have utilized the Baptist Faith and Message as a dividing line, they were not innovative. The precedent had already been set, but not just by Baptists of old; Christians from the earliest centuries of church history had done the same. It has been the practice of the church that, when facing aberrant viewpoints, Christians state clearly what they believe the Bible says about this or that question. In doing so, they make obvious what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. The Gnostic challenge to Christianity resulted in the Apostles’ Creed. The Arian challenge to Christianity resulted in the Nicene Creed. The Eutychian challenge to Christianity resulted in the Chalcedonian Creed. This practice was vital to the preservation of the faith. Bare affirmation of the Bible achieves little harmony. Those of heterodox and orthodox belief can both point to the same Scripture verse but have opposite interpretations of the text. No creed means no doctrine. No doctrine means no Christianity. Perhaps Warren might consider that it is not so-called “creedalism” that has occasioned decline, but the pervasiveness of a non-doctrinal, feeling-oriented spirituality that cannot withstand the storms of life.
Warren would have Southern Baptists think that they might put their confession aside and simply get on with the “mission.” Of course, any probing of what this “mission” is lands very quickly in doctrinal content. It can be acknowledged that circumstances of latter nineteenth-century church culture temporarily allowed for the convention to function without a confession, but the difficulties posed by modernism soon demanded doctrinal clarity. Present circumstances do not allow us to cooperate without clear theological agreement. In a day where many find it difficult to determine what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl, we do not have the luxury of assuming that self-identification with the general mood of a confession constitutes real theological accord. If a pastor outright denies an article of the Baptist Faith and Message, then he does not hold the Baptist Faith and Message.
Furthermore, Warren’s high view of personal liberty does not allow for a confession to serve as an instrument of accountability. He insinuates suffering under “doctrinal uniformity in every jot and tittle.” Many Southern Baptists sense that there is plenty of latitude already in the briefness of the confession, and that this is to be preferred over doctrinal unseriousness. Southern Baptists have already agreed to disagree on many points that are not addressed in their limited confession. Warren does not need to worry about the confession sorting out “100% of every interpretation of Scripture.” At the same time, Warren seems oblivious to the incongruity of demanding that, in the name of liberty, Saddleback remain in good standing with the convention while also denying the convention’s liberty to expect doctrinal agreement. He imposes that churches be able to choose belief in whatever articles they like without impunity (all of this while warning of factionalism).
Warren is surely correct about one thing: “the future and nature of the SBC…hangs in the balance.” The fact is that the denomination cannot afford to wink at denials of its confession lest the majority of its members see that theological union was a sham all along. This would certainly kill the spirit of cooperation.