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Bapto- -Catholics
E. Glenn Hinson
A paper delivered at the Young Scholars Forum, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, July 24,
2006
Only half facetiously I often refer to myself as a Bapto-Quakero-MethodoPresbytero-Lutherano-Episcopo-Catholic. I say “only half facetiously” because once
clear lines between denominations have blurred in the past forty years and I have
attempted throughout my teaching career to help students embrace all of church history
as the history of us all. We are not and cannot be who we are in “splendid isolation” or
“exalted separation” from the rest of Christendom. Curiously, you may still find people
who think of themselves as Baptists who maintain such a stance. This past semester
teaching at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, in fact, one African American student
related that when asked in another class to identify whether she was Catholic, Protestant,
or Orthodox, she had kept waiting for the professor to give another category--Baptist!
Obviously, J.R. Graves and the Landmarkists had left their footprints along her path.
I must confess at the outset that, although I began my church exposure attending
seances in a Spiritualist Church and my Baptist pilgrimage attending Cave Spring
Landmark Missionary Baptist Church in the Missouri Ozarks, I am thankful my journey
did not stop with either. Quite to the contrary, my religious horizons widened
dramatically as the result of a crisis of faith and of vocation during my college years
which freed me from the grip of fundamentalism and opened me to acknowledge truth
wherever or in whatever form I found it. My training at Southern Seminary probably did
not expand my ecumenical outlook as much as it revved up a zeal for missions, but my
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teaching career at the seminary began in 1959 just after the election of Angelo Roncalli
as Pope John XXIII (1958-63) and the radical shift in Roman Catholic attitudes toward
non-Catholics. Taking the first class of students I taught church history to the Abbey of
Gethsemani in November 1960 swept me and my students into a powerful ecumenical
stream we could not resist as Thomas Merton hosted us. From this point on, I found
myself carried along by the combined currents of ecumenism and spirituality which have
characterized this era. Clarity about my views rather than any claim of special merit on
my part prompts me to mention just a few of the ecumenical opportunities which have
been mine: coordinator of a Faith and Order consultation at Southern Seminary in 1977
which framed the statement on baptism which went into the Baptism, Eucharist, and
Ministry document adopted at Lima, Peru in 1982; fifteen years service on the Faith and
Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (1977-1992); six years service on
the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches, chairing the
Apostolic Faith study; ten years participation in the Roman Catholic-Southern Baptist
Scholars Dialogue; five years in the International Baptist-Catholic Conversations
sponsored by the Baptist World Alliance and the Roman Catholic Secretariat for
Christian Unity; participation in a dialogue of Russian Orthodox with western
theologians in Pyatigorsk, Russia, in 1988, to mark the 1000th anniversary of the birth of
Christianity in Russia. I could mention dozens of conferences at local, state, and national
levels I’ve taken part in and innumerable articles I’ve written to make this simple point: I
believe Christians should heed Jesus’ “high priestly prayer” in John 17:21 “that all may
be one, just as You, Father, are in me and I am in you, that they may be one in us in order
that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
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The Baptist and the Larger Christian Tradition
You will readily discern from the preceding comments that I believe Baptists
have much to learn from the larger Christian tradition within which we are located.
Indeed, I think the Baptist tradition would be at great risk if it severed itself from that
larger tradition like a branch lopped off of a tree. Because Baptists have often spoken
disparagingly of “tradition,” however, I had better take a moment to define how I
understand the word. New Testament studies made me realize that tradition, paradosis,
is a good word in biblical theology. From Thomas Merton I have learned to distinguish
“tradition” from “convention.” Tradition is the essence, the kernel; convention is the
external, the husk. When in the past Baptists spoke negatively about tradition as the dead
hand of the past, they really meant convention. The Baptist tradition preserves the
essence of the larger Christian tradition, that is, the catholic tradition, as any number of
confessions of faith adopted by groups of Baptists will confirm. Otherwise, it would not
have survived.
In making this distinction between tradition and convention, I am calling attention
to a critical discernment which Baptists, just like other Christians, must exercise in every
age. In its historical voyage the church has collected a lot of barnacles which require it to
put itself in drydock now and then in order to get its hull scraped and refurbished for the
continuing journey. Not everything which has attached itself to the larger tradition or to
the Baptist tradition is essential or beneficial; some of those conventions, in fact, may
prove quite harmful, obscuring and skewing what the tradition is in its essence. Study of
both Christian and Baptist history will show, I think, that “heresy” (a word I’m hesitant to
use) arises more often from blowing out of proportion one aspect of tradition, usually a
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very legitimate one, at the expense of the central tradition than from a deliberate rejection
of any element of it.1 Let me mention two dangers which we are witnessing today. As
regards the Baptist tradition, one group has made inerrancy of the Bible the sine qua non
for being Baptist and not only neglects but puts in grave danger far more important
elements of the larger Christian tradition which Baptists have inherited, for instance, faith
in the living God. As regards the larger tradition, the fastest growing Christian
movement, Pentecostalism, has redressed a lack of emphasis on the Holy Spirit, but it has
carried charismatic phenomena to an extreme and thus created an at best distorted
expression of faith. I hardly need to say that we should not look to one-sided movements
like these to learn what being Christian means.
I would judge that the healthier approach for Baptists would be to tiptoe back
through our stream to where it connects with the Puritan and then the Anglican and
finally the catholic mainstream. Please note that I’m spelling “catholic” with a little “c”
to distinguish it from Roman Catholic, although Roman Catholic is a part of the
mainstream. By way of the Puritans we also connect with the continental traditions-particularly the Reformed but also the Lutheran and at least the Anabaptist wing of the
Radical Reformation.
What can we learn from this larger Christian tradition within which our tradition
is located? In the Decree on Ecumenism the Second Vatican Council underscored four
bonds between Roman Catholics and Protestants: (1) confession of Jesus Christ as God
and Lord and as the sole Mediator between God and humankind, (2) “love, veneration,
and near cult” of sacred scriptures and study of them, (3) the sacraments of baptism and
1
H.E.W. Turner arrived at a similar conclusion in The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in the Relations
between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co., Ltd, 1954, the
Bampton Lecture for 1954. Genuine orthodoxy depends on balance.
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Lord’s supper, and (4) the Christian way of life nourished by faith in Christ. As flawed
as the churches have been throughout the centuries, I believe we have learned and can
learn from the larger Christian tradition in all four areas, but there is one thing which
Baptists especially must learn from Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans--the value of
tradition as I have defined it earlier. Our culture tries hard to send us scurrying after new
fads, but if tradition is of the essence, we can see how badly we err by doing so. By no
means perfectly but yet genuinely, the churches which have provided the matrix for us
have passed on to us what early Christians thought of as the heart of Christian faith
centered in the creeds of Christendom.
Having said that, let me go on to add that Vatican II put things in the right order.
The Christian tradition is about Jesus Christ. John’s Gospel tells us why: “No one has
ever seen God. The only Son [God] who is in the Father’s bosom, he has exegeted God
for us” (John 1:18). Centuries of debate and controversy, however, should teach us that
we need others to be our companions in cultivating our relationship with Christ. How
gravely those who framed the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message erred when they deleted
the statement in the 1963 BFM: “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is
Jesus Christ.”
The way the Council framed the statement about Protestant views of scriptures,
while affirmative, contains an implied caution which we should heed. Some Protestants
come near to putting scriptures in the place God alone should hold, an idolatry.
Nevertheless, the Protestant reformers did not err in assigning scriptures a central role in
determining what we believe and how we act. Contrary to centuries of distorted views
about it, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans have done the same, but they have
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not carried that to such an extreme that they ignored the many ways God works through
the People of God, the Church.
As I argued in The Evangelization of the Roman Empire early Christians relied
not merely on scriptures or creeds but on other institutions, particularly baptism and
eucharist, to maintain their identity as a covenant missionary people as they incorporated
the syncretistic peoples of the Roman Empire. In baptism one enters the covenant
people, in the eucharist the faithful reiterate their pledge they made at baptism. That was
their answer to the question: “How can the church minister to the world without losing
itself?”
The Second Vatican Council recognized quite rightly that all Christians try to live
a Christian way of life nourished by faith in Christ. Obviously, given the diversity of its
constituents worldwide, there must be room for widely divergent customs. Christians
have erred grievously when they have tried to force conformity to certain conventions of
their own devising. “To be truly Catholic,” Thomas Merton, echoing Paul, has said, “is
not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also
and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to
be all things to all [persons].”2
The Baptist Contribution to the Wider Christian Tradition
This is a good juncture to begin speaking about the contribution of the Baptist
tradition to the wider Christian tradition, for, if I understand this tradition properly, it
has stood steadfastly against the narrow definition of Christian and Catholic and
articulated a comprehensive one based on this theological axiom drawn from John
2
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books, 1966),
185.
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Calvin: “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” That axiom is the theological foundation
upon which Baptists based the tenets which have accorded them their special character:
the voluntary principle in religion, religious liberty, separation of church and state as a
way to safeguard religious liberty, and voluntary association to carry out the world
mission of Christianity.
Many will identify Baptists by the practice of baptizing believers by immersion,
but I believe we need to look behind that custom to say more accurately what
differentiated the first Baptists from other Christians. Why did the Anabaptists and then
Baptists risk their lives regarding this issue? Was it simply a wooden, slavish attachment
to the letter of scriptures, or did they have a deeper concern? The Anabaptists were
concerned, above all, to achieve a “regenerate” church membership and were convinced
they could not achieve that if they continued the practice of baptizing infants. Early
Baptists in England and in the American colonies had another concern, namely, pressure
to conform especially to the Book of Common Prayer. John Bunyan objected to saying
any preformulated prayer, even the Lord’s Prayer, as only “a little lip-labor and bodily
exercise.” Infant baptism was a part of the concern, but it was not the whole. The
broader issue was the voluntary principle. “To be authentic and responsible,” they
insisted tirelessly, “faith must be free.” The baptism of infants was a form of coercion,
and it did not result in holiness of life.
Over the now almost four centuries since the first Baptists emerged in England,
Baptists have gained nearly universal recognition for their contributions to religious
liberty. One of the first Baptists in England, Thomas Helwys, and one of the first
Baptists in the American colonies, Roger Williams, wrote the first treatises calling for
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complete religious liberty. The liberty they called for went far beyond mere toleration
which humanists has argued before them. As Williams framed the radical position, “It is
the will and command of God, that (since the coming of his Sonne the Lord Jesus) a
permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish [Muslim], or Antichristian consciences
and worships, bee granted to all men [and women] in all Nations and Countries: and they
are onely to bee fought against with that Sword which is only (in Soule matters) able to
conquer, to wit, the Sword of Gods Spirit, the Word of God.”3
How best to conserve religious liberty was a key concern among Baptists in the
American colonies, and the answer they gave was separation of church and state. As in
England, so too in the New England and in the South, they saw the majority tyrannize the
minority. Roger Williams used the analogy of a ship at sea to argue for separation. All
aboard must obey the captain regarding their physical welfare, but the captain has no
right to command any to come to the ship’s worship or to prevent some from gathering to
worship according to conscience. In the South John Leland and in New England Isaac
Backus labored unstintingly to secure constitutional separation as stated in the Bill of
Rights ratified in 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In an address delivered from the east
steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, George W. Truett rightly claimed this
amendment as “pre-eminently a Baptist achievement.”4
Baptists do not deserve credit for inventing voluntary association for carrying
out the world mission of Christ; they inherited their congregationalism from English
3
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, List of Propositions
Discussed in the Work; in A Baptist Treasury, edited by Sydnor L. Stealey (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell
Co., 1958), 17.
4
George W. Truett, “Baptists and Religious Liberty, in ibid., 273.
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Separatists and Independents as well as Anabaptists. Nevertheless, they accentuate the
“voluntary” aspect well beyond most others in their insistence on “autonomy.” In a
congregation each individual, including the pastor, has only one vote. No congregation
rules another. No association or other religious body has power over another. Autonomy
operates at all levels.
Did the Baptist idea which I have sketched here extend beyond Baptists?
Winthrop Hudson has pointed out in The Great Tradition of the American Churches and
other writings that, by a confluence of several events, the Baptist idea did much to bring
into being the American emphasis on the voluntary principle, religious liberty, and the
separation of church and state. The vitality of religion in America is largely due to the
nearly complete religious liberty which has prevailed from the beginning. Evidence
perhaps of the far-reaching impact of Baptist thought in the larger Christian tradition is
that fact that the Second Vatican Council devoted an entire schema to religious liberty.
This document affirmed religious freedom as grounded in the dignity of the human
person and in divine revelation and repudiated all coercion in religious matters.5 The
declaration did not express a preference for separation of church and state, but it is
important to note that it did not take a negative position toward the U.S. model as Pope
Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors had in 1864.
I dare not conclude this section, however, without expressing great sadness that
the gravest threat to the principles which Baptists have stood for from the beginning
stems today not from people other than Baptists but from among those who call
themselves Baptists. In the Southern Baptist Convention religious liberty is now
understood not as Helwys and Williams or the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution
5
Declaration on Religious Freedom, chs. 1 and 2.
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have defined it but as freedom to establish the kind of religious society we want as the
Puritans defined it. That includes prayer in public schools and posting of the Ten
Commandments in public buildings. A number of Southern Baptist leaders have
followed Presbyterian evangelist James Kennedy in denouncing the separation of church
and state not only as not a Baptist doctrine but as a “heresy.” One of the major
movements afoot in Southern Baptist churches is replacing congregational polity with an
elder system in which whatever the pastor says goes. I dare say: The Southern Baptist
Convention has ceased to be Baptist!
The Baptist Academy’s Voice
How can the Baptist academy speak with an effective voice both within and
beyond the Baptist/Christian tradition? At one time colleges and universities could
answer that question with more confidence than they can today. Churches established
most of America’s colleges, among other things, in order to train ministers, and they
continued to serve as channels for supplying them until at least the 20th century.
Gradually, however, a larger portion of candidates for minstry have come through the
state universities. Among Baptists in the South the so-called conservative resurgence has
muddied further once fairly clear relationships between the Baptist constituency and the
institutions. Some schools have sought to accomodate the fundamentalist-leaning group,
but others have taken steps to take control of trustee nominations out of the hands of the
Baptist bodies who have usually appointed them and to make boards self-perpetuating.
How Baptist institutions of higher learning speak within and beyond the Baptist/Christian
tradition, therefore, will depend to a considerable extent on who controls them. Since
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most of us here represent schools under more independent auspices, I will look at the
question from that standpoint.
Let me say, first, that the Baptist academy will undoubtedly have its most
effective voice through its graduates. They are the ones who will carry not only into the
churches but into the public arena the outlook and attitude toward life with which the
school has formed them. In a presidential address for the National Association of Baptist
Professors of Religion in 1994 I cited five factors which make it urgent that we not just
inform but form students “for living in a world that poses a grave threat to their survival
in much the same way early Christians sought to form people literally to die for their
faith.”6 These are: the fragmentation of society by a debate over what role religion is to
play in public life; “overemphasis (in higher education) upon empirical observation and
rational reflection and neglect of what Theodore Roszak calls ‘the powers of
transcendence’”; “the religious search going on with the ‘Baby Boom’generation” and, I
would now add, “Generation X”; “the awakening we have been experiencing since the
sixties, the fourth such awakening in American history”; and “the revolution in
communication which is reversing the one which took place on the eve of the Protestant
Reformation and influenced so profoundly the diverse directions Catholics and
Protestants would proceed.”7 Today I would add to these the crisis in Muslim/Christian
relations which puts the world on the brink of a conflict potentially more disastrous than
World War II, which cost 60 million lives and incalculable devastation.
Can Baptist-related educational institutions do anything which will matter in the
face of such challenges? Let me be bold in saying that they can if they are not afraid to
6
E. Glenn Hinson, “The Educational Task of Baptist Teachers of Religion on the Edge of a New
Millennium,” Perspectives in Religious Studies, 22 (Fall 1995), 228.
7
Ibid., 229-33.
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attempt whole-personed formation. What do I mean when I speak about “formation”? I
must admit that my Baptist sensitivities make me cautious in using this word. If we are
to remain faithful to our tradition, we will exercise care that we educate rather than
indoctrinate. Our objective should be to help students discover for themselves the deep
and abiding truths and the transcendent reality which can guide them through life.
Having made that apology, let me elucidate briefly how whole-personed formation will
respond to these six challenges.
1. Whole-personed formation will not join the chorus of those who sing the
praises of secularity. You will know that I am not an enthusiast for the Religious Right,
but I must recognize that they have fingered a concern which you and I should share. We
do not want a society which leaves no room for religion in the public sphere. Yale law
professor Stephen L. Carter may have sounded a little too religious rightish when he
charged that America has developed a “culture of disbelief” and generates a “forceful
skepticism,”8 but he was right in noting what Martin Marty has called “controlled
secularity.” Religion is assigned a place.9 Baptists still convinced about the rightness of
separation of church and state need to rethink or perhaps decide for the first time how we
want our faith to shape what happens in politics and in the ethos of society. The
university is the proper sphere for that conversation.
2. At the center of this concern for whole-personed formation will be recovery of
balance between the empirical and rational powers and the “powers of transcendence.”
In church-related institutions of higher learning, we want to do more than hand out
information and equip people with skills for this or that job. If Roszak is right, there is a
8
Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religios Devotion
(New York: Basic Books, 1993).
9
Martin E. Marty, The Modern Schism (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), 95-144.
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downhill slide in American higher education toward “the single vision.” Virtually every
article I’ve seen in the past several years has expressed hopes that the University of
Louisville and the University of Kentucky are becoming “great research universities.”
The U of L trustees upped the president’s salary to $521,000 this year for his contribution
to that objective. There is, however, a disquieting factor which is increasingly evident to
me. Graduates of these two schools are poorly equipped, or not equipped at all, for
graduate and professional education such as we offer in seminaries. In a word, they have
had their heads stuffed with information and perhaps learned some skills, but they have
not learned how to think! They do poorly alongside graduates of private and churchrelated schools. In that lies a clue to what the Baptist academy has to offer the world that
the world doesn’t have more of than it needs.
In a study which the Education Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
asked me to do in the early 1970’s, I concluded that the purpose of church-related
colleges and universities should differ self-consciously from that of state-sponsored
counterparts. When the Morrill Act created the land grand colleges, now the state
universities, in 1862, it directed them to provide “knowledge for use.” They have done
that and done it well, and the public has rewarded them for it. Unfortunately, as they
have supplied what the public demanded, they have neglected and shoved aside “the
powers of transcendence”--those gifts cultivated by the humanities and the arts and
religion. At times private and church-related schools have aped their more affluent statesupported counterparts and have relegated to a subordinate place something without
which civilization cannot continue--Wisdom. That was a misstep not only for the schools
but for the society itself. Church-related schools should seek to provide a balance
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without which western civilization not only may not recover its health but may not
survive. By virtue of their connection with the church, I concluded, they should strive “to
assist the churches in influencing, directing, shaping, and transforming culture or, if you
please, civilization.”10 In that statement, which I would not alter today, I envisioned an
immensely critical task for Baptist and other Christian educational institutions. The
civilization of the northern hemisphere is at a critical juncture which puts it in desperate
need of perspective which Christian- or religion-related educational institutions can and
must supply if it is to survive.
3. Whole-personed formation is absolutely essential if we are to satisfy the search
of “Baby Boomers’ and “GenXers.” According to Wade Clark Roof, “Baby Boomers,”
persons born between 1946 and 1965, are “a generation of seekers,” a description which
would also fit early Baptists in the 17th century. “Boomers” have a keen interest in
spirituality but a negative view of “religion,” which they identify with institutional
expressions. “Baby busters” or “GenXers,” persons born between 1965 and 1977, also
are highly concerned about spirituality but are less negative about institutional religion
than their parents.11
4. Whole-personed formation goes hand in glove with the current awakening.
This awakening, like its three predecessors, has gone through three stages. It began with
a period of disorder and disorientation in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. That was followed
by a deepened religious search in the late-1970’s and 1980’s. Since the 1990’s we have
been witnessing the change of consciousness which results. It has some connection with
10
11
E. Glenn Hinson, “Why Baptist Colleges?” The Southern Baptist Educator, 36 (May-June 1972), 3-4.
See George Barna, Baby Busters: The Disillusioned Generation (Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 1992).
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what we call Postmodernism. I think it would not be inaccurate to describe the present
era, beginning with Pope John XXIII, as “The Age of Transcendence.”
5. The shifting of our culture from a typographic to a more iconic and tactual
approach to reality is probably our ally in whole-personed formation. Essays which I
asked my students at Richmond to write about “How I Learn” uniformly emphasized two
factors beyond the traditional auditory and lectionary approaches--visually and “hands
on.” Our age is too caught up in entertainment, in “amusing ourselves to death” as Neil
Postman says, but there are many signs of more serious searching for something which
the Enlightenment emphasis on science and technology has not satisfied.
6. Finally, the dangerous precipice on which Christians, especially Christians of
the northern hemisphere, stand in our relations with people of other faiths, above all,
Muslims, will necessitate a maturity we have seldom manifested. Nothing less than a
profound spiritual formation will be adequate to generate an openness sufficient for
radically changing the climate of hostility which now exists. Christians must sink their
roots deep if they are going to be able to carry on a fruitful dialogue with Muslims in the
tense environment we live in today. Abraham Heschel once said,
I suggest that the most significant basis for meeting of men [and women] of
different religious traditions is the level of fear and trembling, of humility and
contrition, where our individual moments of faith are mere waves in the endless
ocean of [hu]mankind’s reaching out for God, where all formulations and
articulations appear as understatements, where our souls are swept away by the
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awareness of the urgency of answering God’s commandment, while stripped of
pretension and conceit we sense the tragic insufficiency of human faith.12
What would a university with such an ethos look like? We probably have not witnessed
its like up to now, but it should provide an environment for what Douglas Steere called
“mutual irradiation.” Rather than seeking to overwhelm others or to blend with them into
a new religious hodgepodge or simply to coexist, we let ourselves be irradiated by the
light of God in them and let the light of God in us irradiate them.13
In sum, as I have argued recently in a paper on “Baptist/Christian Identity(ies) in
American Higher Education” prepared for Perspectives in Religious Studies, I think that
there is an openness and liberality inherent in the Baptist tradition, properly understood,
which may give Baptist educational institutions a voice within and beyond the tradition.
You will find it well expressed in the charter of Rhode Island College founded in 1865.
Its founders, the charter stated,
enacted and declared, That into this liberal and catholic institution shall never be
admitted any religious tests: But, on the contrary, all the members hereof shall
forever enjoy full, free, absolute and uninterrupted liberty of conscience: And that
the places of Professors, Tutors, and all other officers, the President alone
excepted, shall be free and open for all denominations of Protestants: And that
youth of all religious denominations shall and may be freely admitted to the equal
advantages, emoluments and honors of the College or University.14
12
Abraham J. Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 21 (1966), 122.
Douglas V. Steere, Mutual Irradiation: A Quaker View of Ecumenism. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 175
(Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1971).
14
Cited by Barnas Sears, Historical Discourse: Celebration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the
Founding of Brown University (Providence, RI: Sidney S. Rider & Bro., 1865), 61-62.
13
17
We, of course, will need to broaden our doors to include more than Protestants, but if
Baptist-related schools could grasp such a grand catholic vision as these forebears had,
they might play a very critical role in effecting what Arnold Toynbee, the great
metahistorian, posited as the task of the world’s religions today. On his eightieth
birthday he wrote:
The present threat to human personality is the greatest peril to which [hu]mankind
has exposed itself at any time so far since our ancestors became human; the threat
to the physical survival of the human race is merely an incidental consequence of
this spiritual crisis. The higher religions alone can help [hu]mankind to save itself
from itself by helping it to regain contact with the ultimate spiritual reality which
is the ground of being and the source of salvation.
The change of heart is the heart of the matter.15
Christian Practices and Virtues to Cultivate in the Baptist Academy
What practices and virtues generally discernible as a part of the Christian
tradition are worthy of cultivation within the Baptist academy? A good question, but
perhaps well beyond the capacity of any of us to answer satisfactorily. Perhaps the most
useful way for me to approach it is to speak about what I value from the traditions with
which our Baptist tradition connects.
1. The starting point for selecting such practices and virtues should be a
recognition and affirmation of Christianity’s historic ties with Judaism. Everything
which stands at the center of our Christian faith--God, love, the Covenant, scriptures,
Jesus Christ, moral sensitivity, responsibility for humankind and for the earth--derives
from Judaism. Our forebears erred gravely when they denied the Jewish people their
15
Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 328.
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continuing role in God’s purpose and laid exclusive claim to the Covenant. They sinned
greviously when they persecuted their parent. With Thomas Merton I would say, “One
has either got to be a Jew or stop reading the Bible. The Bible cannot make sense to
anyone who is not ‘spiritually a Semite.’”16
2. I may shock you a little when I put it this way, but there is far more to affirm
about the Roman Catholic tradition than there is to deny. Like all reformers, those of the
16th century got carried away and sometimes “threw out the baby with the bathwater.”
To be quite honest, I’m not at all sure after fifty years of reflection on it that the
reformation was the best thing that could have happened. It was inevitable perhaps but
not necessarily good. Unlike some of our Anabaptist and Baptist forebears, I do not think
the Church “fell” either at the end of the apostolic age or with Constantine or at some
later epoch and did not find a proper resuscitation until we came along in the 16th or 17th
centuries. Pace the Protestant Dispensationalists, I don’t think that the Holy Spirit
expired when the last apostle died or held out on deathbed until the canon was closed.
Quite to the contrary, the living God has worked through very flawed humanity through
the centuries. He was a little cynical, but Boccacio tells this wonderful fable descriptive
of the Church at its worst in the 15th century. A Florentine had tried for years to convert
a Jewish friend to Christianity, but the Jew had always resisted. He was content with his
faith. One day, unexpectedly, he came to his Christian friend and said, “I believe I will
become a Christian, but first I must see Rome.” The Christian’s hope plummeted. “Oh,
no! My God, if he goes to Rome he will never become a Christian.” By no amount of
persuasion could he change his Jewish friend’s mind. Off he went to Rome. He was
gone for two or three months. When he returned, he was beaming. “At last, I have
16
Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 14.
19
decided to become a Christian!” “You have,” the Florentine said. “You went to Rome
and you decided to become a Christian?!” “Oh, yes, “ he replied. “I saw all of the
corruption there. I saw the cupidity and stupidity of the pope. The papal palace is a
brothel. And I said to myself, ‘If Christianity has survived this through all of these
centuries, surely it must be of God!’”
What practices and virtues from this Catholic tradition would be worthy to
cultivate within the Baptist academy? To be fair, we must allow for human failing to live
up to ideals, but I would cite these Catholic practices and virtues: (1) respect for human
life in opposing abortion except under stringent circumstances, capital punishment under
any circumstances, and war except as a last resort and only for carefully specified
reasons; (2) a rich treasury of devotion authenticated by centuries of faithfulness from the
martyrs of early centuries and saints through the ages; (3) a spirit of deep theological
reflection focused on the person and work of Jesus Christ as the answer to humankind’s
deep needs from the Apostle Paul through Origen and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to
Hans Küng; (4) an incredible display of faithfulness by saints from the slave girl
Blandina of Lyons and the noblewoman Perpectua of Carthage to Archbishop Romero of
San Salvador and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. These are but the tip of an iceberg.
3. What practices and virtues from the Anglican tradition are worthy of
cultivation within the Baptist academy? Let us recognize in asking that question that the
Church of England did not act quite as recklessly as the continental reformers. It
affirmed the Protestant Principle, but it retained “Catholic substance.” Anglicanism,
following early Christian custom, sought to balance five elements: (a) reading of
scriptures (the OT once and the NT four times a year); (b) prayer five times daily
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according to the pattern of the early church; (c) reason in theological reflection; (d)
continuity with the ancient and medieval church; and (e) communion encouraged once a
week. I find much worthy of cultivation in this perspective and would like to underline
the following: (1) The Church of England rightly emphasized continuity rather than
discontinuity. Correlative to this is the fact that there was no “fall” in which the Church
ceased to be the Church, its many missteps notwithstanding. God is not that capricious.
Out of this perspective has arisen my effort to help students embrace all of church history
as their history. (2) Accordingly, the Church of England was on target in drawing
wisdom for itself from the early and the medieval church as well as from scriptures.
What a great loss for Protestants, especially of the Free Church tradition, to assume that
God ceased to speak from about 100 or 312 C.E. until the 16th or 17th centuries! For a
change in our attitude, we can probably thank Pope John XXIII, but the Church of
England knew it from the Reformation on. I think it is a healthy sign that Baptist
colleges have replaced Bible Departments with Religion Departments. (3) This may be
an idiosyncrasy of mine, but I think the liturgy of the Church of England makes more
faithful use of scriptures than any other, and I’m fully in agreement that we should
encourage weekly observance of communion. Because of its diverse student
constituency the Baptist academy probably needs to make room for many different types
of service, but it would not hurt to have some where students could take communion each
week. Nor would it hurt Baptist churches to return to the practice of the earliest Christian
churches!
4. What practices and virtues which our Puritan forebears inculcated are worthy
of cultivation within the Baptist academy? Because the Religious Right has laid claim to
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some of the Puritan heritage, some of us might think it too sullied to have anything worth
emulating. Do not count me among those. Although I recognize features of Puritanism
which led to coercion of our Baptist forebears, I think that the central concern of the
Puritans is one we should continue to espouse in the Baptist academy as well as in our
churches. That two-sided concern was heart religion manifested in transformed lives and
persistent effort to transform society. (1) The Puritans returned to medieval and early
Christian sources to fashion manuals telling how they might develop their relationship
with God in such a way that it would change their lives. Our Baptist/Puritan forebear
John Bunyan, as I have demonstrated in an article,17 sounded much like some of the
desert monks when he spoke about prayer. (2) The Puritans, however, wanted change not
only in personal lives but also in the society they lived in. Ultimately, out of their quest
came the “Great Awakening” and the religious liberty so precious to Baptists.
5. What practices and virtues which the continental reformers emphasized are
worthy of cultivation within the Baptist academy? Baptists obviously have their most
intimate connections with the Reformed and the Anabaptist reformers, but these were
indebted to Luther for his articulation of the Protestant principle derived from the
doctrine of salvation by grace through faith, that is, the priesthood of all believers. E.Y.
Mullins restated this doctrine as the religious axiom: “All [persons] have an equal right to
direct access to God.” He underscored the word “direct.” “There should be no
institution, human person, rite, or system which stands between the individual person and
17
E. Glenn Hinson, “Prayer in John Bunyan and the Early Monastic Tradition,” Cistercian Studies, 18
(1983), 217-30.
22
God,” he explained.18 This doctrine has figured prominently in the Southern Baptist
Convention controversy.
John Calvin played a much heavier role than Luther did, however, in shaping
Puritan and thence early Baptist thought and practice. One can attribute to Calvin the
Puritan accent on heart religion manifested in transformed lives and transformation of
society. English exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-58) fled to Geneva,
Strassburg, and Zürich and returned embued with reforms going on there and intent on
achieving a “further reformation” in England. When they got rebuffed for their efforts in
England, they carried their dream to New England. One group of Baptists, Particular
Baptists, were strict Calvinists; the other, General Baptists, less so, but Calvin left a deep
mark on the Baptist tradition. The question here is: What of this heritage should Baptists
cultivate within the Baptist academy? One group of Southern Baptist leaders, headed by
Albert Mohler and Timothy George, want to return to the “five point Calvinism” of
James P. Boyce. Another group, headed by Paige Patterson, oppose that. I’m inclined to
go along with mainline Presbyterians who approach Calvin critically. I would not
promote the determinism nor the low view of human nature, the “bondage of the will,”
espoused by either Luther or Calvin. Calvin was a good interpreter of scriptures, but he
drew his understanding of God from Stoicism rather than from the Bible. Worthy to
cultivate in the Baptist academy, however, in addition to those listed for the Puritans
would be the high value the Reformed tradition has placed on education, a virtue Baptists
have undervalued all too often.
6. What about Anabaptist practices and virtues? Baptists share with Anabaptists’
descendants the practice of believers’ baptism and thus join them in the Free Church
18
E.Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (Rev. ed.; Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1978), 75.
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tradition. We share with them commitment to religious liberty and the separation of
church and state. Baptists, however, have not usually assumed their “Christ against
culture” stance and, insofar as I can see, not understood themselves as a “Martyr
Church,” which derives from that view of culture. They have favored, instead, a “Christ
transforming culture” approach derived from the Reformed tradition. Baptists have
practiced discipline but not to the extent of the Bann, a practice of shunning offenders,
which stands at the center of the Brethren’s effort to achieve a regenerate church
membership. Baptists have had some pacifists, but Baptists in general would not fit the
category of a “Peace Church.” In the present time, however, in a world full of violence,
wouldn’t the pacifist teaching and practice of the Mennonites, Brethren, and Friends be
something at least to explore within the Baptist academy?
7. I have shown some basis for identifying myself as a Bapto-Quakero-MethodoPresbytero-Lutherano-Episcopo-Catholic with the exception of Methodism. I should not
come to a halt, therefore, without mentioning the impact which Pietism and “the Great
Awakening” had on both of us. Methodism was born out of Pietism and the awakening
while many Baptists were reborn out of them. Both groups got caught up in the powerful
mission movement which emerged in the late-18th and 19th centuries. Both were zealous
to effect conversions, but Baptists might learn from Methodists to put greater weight on
continuing spiritual growth (sanctification), which takes us back to the catholic tradition.
The task which I have proposed for the Baptist academy probably seems
overwhelming. Lest we throw up our hands in despair, however, we should recognize
that we represent a tradition rooted in confidence not in ourselves but in God, in God’s
initiative. Our forebears trusted God, the Holy Spirit, the Living Christ, far more than
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they did popes or councils of bishops or creeds or a particular view of scriptures. “To be
authentic and responsible,” they never tired of saying, “faith must be free.” Faith is not
ascribing to a set of propositions or worshipping in a set pattern or acting in a prescribed
manner. It is, as Abraham Heschel has said, “a blush in the presence of God.”19 Our
chief task is to enable people to relax and to respond. The Baptist academy should not be
only a place to prepare people for jobs. It should be a community in which people open
to that love which is at the heart of things.
19
Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1951), 91.