Stephen B. Chapman
Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy
Regent’s Park College, Oxford
August 3–6, 2005
[DRAFT 7/26/05]
Interpreting the Old Testament in Baptist Life
There is an autobiographical dilemma at the heart of this paper, and it probably
makes sense to go ahead and describe it at the outset. Not very long ago, I was a little
startled to realize that I had become a “Baptist Old Testament scholar.” Now, I have been
a committed Baptist for all of my adult life and I spent a considerable number of years in
graduate school. It may therefore beg belief that the nature of my present profession
could be any kind of surprise at all. Yet it was the conjunction of those terms “Baptist”
and “Old Testament” that gave me pause. I realized almost immediately that although my
interest in Old Testament study has grown out of and is deeply related to my broader
Christian commitments and theological beliefs, very little if any of my Old Testament
scholarship has a conscious link to specific Baptist distinctives, traditions or practices.
For me, being “Baptist” and becoming an “Old Testament” scholar have been two
alternate but parallel tracks.
Some of the reason for this sense of two separate tracks may have come about
because I did not attend any Baptist institutions of higher learning. My divinity school
education and my graduate school experience took place at the same kind of large
research university at which I now teach. I never found this environment to be
particularly hostile to my Christian faith. In fact, there was much about it that encouraged
and pushed me, not only to deepen my religious convictions but to take them with the
utmost seriousness in the ordering of my life and career. But there was never much about
my education that was really very Baptist either.
I think my strong sense of Scripture’s crucial theological importance likely comes
from some kind of Baptist DNA. The process by which I discerned a calling to preach
and to teach was at least partly inspired by the example of a number of Baptist pastors
and church school teachers, not least my own parents. As I made my decision to do
doctoral work in Old Testament rather than New Testament, something of my choice was
made in response to what I felt was the increasing eclipse of Old Testament Scripture
within the mainline Baptist churches with which I was familiar. My frustration with
standard historical-critical work on the Bible came from an acute awareness of what was
lost when interpretive attention focused so intently on reconstructing the world behind the
text that the transformative power of the text itself could no longer be engaged or set
loose.
2
But what does Baptist tradition actually hold about the Old Testament? Are there
particularly viewpoints that can be identified or particular problems to be addressed?
Now that I seem to be a “Baptist Old Testament scholar” do I have a special
responsibility to acknowledge or pursue certain questions, lines of inquiry, debates or
projects because of the stream of theological tradition in which I find myself? Might my
own ideas and work be strengthened or helpfully challenged if I were to engage the
voices of those from my own religious heritage, those with whom I may very well
already share many first principles?
In one way, these sorts of questions are not different in kind from the kinds of
questions others might ask, especially within the context of the university—for example,
what might it mean to be a “Baptist political scientist,” a “Baptist biologist” or a “Baptist
basketball coach”? Yet what may be different about the notion of a “Baptist Old
Testament scholar” is perhaps simply that, rightly or wrongly, biblical interpretation and
theological convictions seem more necessarily interdependent. It just seems more
counter-intuitive that being Baptist would not make a difference to how one went about
explicating the Old Testament. The political scientist, the biologist and basketball coach,
it can be argued, might all do their jobs differently in some ways if they were Baptist. But
then again, it can also be argued that they might not. And that “might not” argument is
the one that seems less convincing about what I do, at least it seems increasingly
unconvincing to me.
In what follows, then, I first want to explore the status of the Old Testament
within Baptist tradition. I am going to make the case that the Old Testament has a highly
ambiguous place in Baptist tradition as it has developed, particularly in the twentieth
century. At the end of the nineteenth century, Old Testament interpretation found itself
located precisely at the opening fissure between religious faith and modernity. Within the
church, Old Testament interpretation became intensely politicized as the front line of
defense in the battle against secularism. Within the university, the act of reading the Old
Testament as Christian Scripture was increasingly viewed as a kind of category error or
conceptual mistake. Reviewing Baptist history will show how bitter debate over Scripture
has led to a kind of interpretive stalemate in which the Old Testament is now more often
ignored than contested.
In light of that contemporary situation, I then intend to engage in an act of
retrieval from Baptist tradition, looking for significant voices from the past who have
read the Old Testament in a way that was fundamental to their Baptist identity. The
voices I have chosen are Roger Williams, Helen Barrett Montgomery and H.H. Rowley. I
want to suggest what we can learn about Old Testament interpretation from each of these
three Baptists and how what we learn from them might helpfully reframe not only how I
do my job, but how Baptists might read the Old Testament baptistically.
A New Testament Faith?
Writing at the end of his magisterial Baptist history, Robert Torbet addressed the
topic of “Baptist Contributions to Protestantism.”1 The first contribution on his list was
that Baptists had “strengthened the protest of evangelical Protestantism against
traditionalism” by their insistence on “the supremacy of the Scriptures as the all1
Robert G. Torbet, A History of the Baptists (3d ed.; Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson Press, 1963), 512–33.
3
sufficient and sole norm for faith and practice in the Christian life.”2 Torbet had good
reasons for his claim. He noted that the articles of faith John Smyth drew up for his
fledging Baptist congregation in Amsterdam included a reference from Scripture for
every doctrinal claim, a move which Torbet thought had then become the pattern for
subsequent Baptist confessions of faith.3 Thomas Helwys’s 1611 “Declaration of Faith”
provided a strong statement about scriptural authority in its Article 23: “That the
scriptures of the Old and New Testament are written for our instruction, 2 Tim 3:16, and
that we ought to search them for they testify of Christ, Jn 5:39, and therefore [are] to be
used with all reverence, as containing the Holy Word of God, which only is our direction
in all things whatsoever.”4
Such affirmations of Holy Scripture can be found throughout all of the early
Baptist statements and confessions. In these statements there is never any explicit
distinction drawn between the two testaments in terms of their relative authority or merit.
Article 23 of the First London Confession (1644) refers to “the holy Scriptures” as “the
rule whereby saints both in matters of faith and conversation are to be regulated” and
Article 7 of the Second London Confession (1677–88) maintains “The rule of this
knowledge, faith, and obedience, concerning the worship and service of God, and all
other Christian duties, is not man’s inventions, opinions, devices, laws, constitutions, or
traditions unwritten whatsoever, but only the word of God contained in the canonical
Scriptures.”5 This doctrinal elevation of Scripture reached its zenith in the influential first
article of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833; ed. of 1853):
We believe the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect
treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its
end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter; that it reveals the
principles by which God will judge us; and therefore is, and shall remain to the
end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by
which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried.6
These words about Scripture proved especially significant in light of later Baptist
disputes about Scripture. Over and over again in subsequent Baptist polemics in the
United States it will be the proposal of theological conservatives to return to the New
Hampshire Confession, or some variant of it, as a means of preserving the orthodoxy of
the faith in the teeth of modernity’s challenges.
2
Torbet, History, 513.
Torbet, History, 513. Torbet appears to be referring to the 1611 “Declaration of Faith” (authored by
Thomas Helwys) rather than either John Smyth’s 1609 or 1610 “Short Confession,” neither of which
provided scriptural citations for their specific doctrinal points. For full texts of these confessions and
further historical background, see William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (rev. ed; Valley Forge,
Penn.: Judson, 1969). Unless otherwise stipulated, I use the text of the confessions that Lumpkin provides.
4
As quoted in Torbet, History, 513–14. I have taken the liberty of modernizing the archaic spelling.
5
As quoted in Torbet, History, 514. Here again I have adjusted some of the spelling and punctuation. I
have also adjusted Torbet’s dating of the confessions so that they are line with those given by W.R. Estep,
“Baptists and Authority: The Bible, Confessions, and Conscience in the Development of Baptist Identity,
Review and Expositor 84 (1987): 599–615. The wording Torbet gives here for Article 7 is different from
that provided by Lumpkin, which most likely means that the two scholars are working from different
versions of the Confession, which went through several editions.
6
As quoted in Torbet, History, 514.
3
4
Yet all of this is still only part of the story about the early Baptists and Scripture.
Baptists had a “special and distinctive reason for [their] appeal to Scripture,” as H.
Wheeler Robinson once put it: “It was their one ground for the practice of believers’
baptism which could be maintained against the appeal to the tradition of the Church.”7 As
Robinson perceived, Baptists’ relentless insistence upon grounding all doctrine in
Scripture was no historical accident but actually a necessary corollary of their convictions
about the proper form and meaning of baptism. Since those convictions were viewed as
themselves growing out of Scripture, a kind of interlocking structure of warrant and claim
existed between scriptural text and lived Christian practice, a structure that was basic to
early Baptist identity and self-understanding.
Within this conceptual structure, however, the New Testament was
hermeneutically privileged. As Robinson further summarized: “In Amsterdam John
Smyth obeyed his own Church Covenant by following the guidance of the New
Testament into Baptist convictions; he was led to maintain in teaching and practice that
the true basis of the Church was not an arbitrary covenant, but the ordinance of baptism
administered to believers only.”8 In other words, while the relationship between Scripture
and baptism was seen as mutually reinforcing by early Baptists, Scripture itself was read
through a kind of salvation-historical lens in which the New Testament, as distinct from
the Old, provided the most direct and literal guidance for Christian living and church
governance. The scriptural warrant for baptism was found in the New Testament.
Therefore, the duty of Christian believers was to order their lives and their churches
according to the New Testament’s specific mandates; this would come to be called “New
Testament Christianity.”9
W.R. Estep argued that “a distinct New Testament hermeneutic” characterizes the
Anabaptist confessions of faith that had significant influence on early General Baptists.10
The Anabaptist Waterlander Confession (1580) described the biblical basis of true faith
as “contained in the books of the New Testament to which we join all that which is found
in the canonical books of the Old Testament and which is consonant with the doctrine of
Christ and his Apostles and in accord with the administration of his spiritual kingdom.”11
John Smyth’s early confessions of faith were heavily influenced by the Waterlanders’
theology, with his first confession (1609) serving as a petition for membership in the
Waterlanders’ circle of churches and his second confession (1610) being an abbreviated
version of the Waterlanders’ own. Thus, Thomas Helwys’s 1611 “Declaration of Faith”
did provide a statement about the authority of both testaments in Article 23 but also
stipulated in Article 9: “That Jesus Christ is Mediator of the New Testament between
God and Man, 1 Tim 2:5, having all power in Heaven and in Earth given unto him. Matt
28:18. Being the only king, Lk 1:33, being the only law-giver, [he] has in his Testament
set down an absolute and perfect rule of direction for all persons at all times to be
observed…”12 As both the quotation from the Waterlander confession and this citation
7
H. Wheeler Robinson, The Life and Faith of the Baptists (rev. ed.; London: Kingsgate, 1946), 16.
Robinson, Life and Faith, 13.
9
E.g., Robinson, Life and Faith, 69.
10
Estep, “Baptists,” 602.
11
Estep, “Baptists,” 603.
12
As cited in Estep, “Baptists,” 605. I have adjusted somewhat the spelling and the punctuation for the sake
of clarity.
8
5
from Helwys’s “Declaration” make evident, the privileging of the New Testament arises
out of a strong desire to affirm and even strengthen the christological basis of the faith.
As becomes very apparent in the later General Baptist “Standard Confession”
(1660; rev. 1663), this New Testament orientation also reinforced and was reinforced by
the commitment to believers’ baptism. Article 11 of the Standard Confession relates to
the subject of the true church and describes those “who preach not [Christ’s] doctrine, but
instead thereof, the scriptureless thing of sprinkling infants (falsely called baptism)
whereby the pure word of God is made of no effect, and the New Testament way of
bringing in members into the church by regeneration [is] cast out; when as the bond
woman and her son, that is to say, the Old Testament way of bringing in children into the
church, by generation, is cast out, as says the Scripture…” Here a distinctive association
between Christology, ecclesiology, baptism and the New Testament is given clear
expression.
Estep maintains that this network of convictions was characteristic of early
Baptists until the rise of the more calvinistic Particular Baptist tradition, evident in the
second London Confession of 1677–88, whose articles on Scripture in Chapter 1 were
basically a word-for-word republication of the same articles from the Westminister
Confession with only a few minor additions.13 For the first time in Baptist tradition, as
Estep correctly notes, an article about Scripture became the first article of the entire
confession.14 Moreover, although Estep neglects to make this fully explicit, in no article
of the Second London Confession is the Old Testament put in opposition to the New
Testament in the same way as in the Anabaptist stream of tradition. Instead, the Old
Testament is viewed as relating an earlier portion of a common salvation history that
reached its culmination in the New, without that, however, negating what the Old still
had to say. Chapter 7, Article 3: “This covenant [of grace] is revealed in the gospel; first
of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by
farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament…” In
other words, as this citation makes quite clear, the “gospel” is to be sought and found
within the Old Testament as well as within the New!15
Estep, “Baptists,” 609.
Estep, “Baptists,” 610. Estep errs slightly, however, in also claiming that the Second London Confession
for the first time in Baptist tradition declared the Bible “infallible.” Article 1 of Chapter 1 refers to Holy
Scripture as “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”
In other words, Scripture is not infallible as such but in its role as a rule, or, as Article 9 puts it, as the
source of “those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation.” Article 9
of the confession further states that “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself,”
which is thus in the first instance a statement about scriptural interpretation rather than Scripture per se.
15
Note also the claim made in Chap. 11, Art. 6, that “the justification of believers under the Old Testament
was in all these respects one and the same with the justification of believers under the New Testament.” So,
too, while a customary distinction was drawn between moral and ceremonial law in the Old Testament,
care was taken to say that “Christ in the gospel [does not in] any way dissolve [the moral law] but much
strengthen[s] this obligation” (Chap. 19, Art. 5). Religious liberty was known “also to believers under the
law for the substance of them; but under the New Testament the liberty of Christians is further enlarged in
their freedom from the yoke of the ceremonial law to which the Jewish church was subjected; and in
greater boldness of access to the throne of grace; and in fuller communications of the free Spirit of God,
than believers under the law did ordinarily partake of” (Chap. 21, Art. 1). The feature common to all of
these theological formulations is their striking refusal to restrict God’s work of grace to the New Testament
alone.
13
14
6
The point I am arguing is that while early General Baptists’ conviction about the
propriety of believers’ baptism went hand-in-hand with their explicit doctrine of
Scripture, believers’ baptism also, ironically, provided a wedge of distinction between the
two testaments of the Christian Bible when it came to General Baptists’ soteriology and
ecclesiology, resulting in a tendency toward a supersessionist hermeneutic. As much as
the Old Testament was cited, preached upon, and thoroughly part of the scriptural world
within which General Baptists lived, the depiction of Christian existence in the New
Testament still exercised both a primitivistic appeal and an ultimate authority beyond
what was sought for the Old Testament. The more Calvinistic Particular Baptists
possessed a much greater theological sensitivity for the role of the Old Testament as
Scripture, although their account of scriptural authority also opened up the possibility of
an over-emphasis on Scripture, even the danger of bibliolatry.16 The main point is that
both traditions yielded differing appraisals of the Old Testament within Baptist life and
these two traditions have never been fully clarified or reconciled with respect to each
other.
True, much of Christian tradition in general has had difficulty knowing what to do
with the Old Testament, even down to the present day, so in one sense early Baptists
were not all that unusual or distinctive. But, I would maintain, because of their peculiar
views about baptism, which they found so clearly and abundantly in the New Testament,
but not in the Old Testament or in mainstream church tradition, the hermeneutical
privileging of the New Testament over the Old took on a greater acceptance over time, a
more established place and a more honored status in Baptist self-understanding than in at
least some of the other Christian theological traditions.
The Intensifications of Modernity
Without tracing out the entirety of Baptist history with the relationship between
the two testaments in view, I would nevertheless like to offer a few illustrative examples
of the ambiguous status of the Old Testament in Baptist tradition and attempt to show
how I think uncertainty about it has actually intensified over the last century in the United
States.
As Grant Wacker has argued,17 it was in the latter part of the nineteenth century
that modernity first came to be perceived as a wide-ranging threat to U.S. Protestants.
The Enlightenment-generated debates over biblical interpretation so familiar to European
Christians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found little foothold on American
soil beyond the intellectual awareness of a very restricted cultural elite. While an
impressive tradition of academic biblical studies existed in the first half of the nineteenth
century, one of the indirect consequences of the U.S. Civil War appears to have been the
This criticism is made by Estep, “Baptists,” 613, who views the shift represented by Second London
Confession as a fatal and long-lasting flaw in Baptist tradition, one responsible for the modern debate over
inerrancy in the Southern Baptist Convention. As I have already suggested, I think this conclusion is
somewhat over-drawn and one-sided, even though Estep’s analysis is otherwise insightful and helpful.
17
Grant Wacker, “The Demise of Biblical Civilization,” in Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll (eds.), The
Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 121–38.
Wacker attributes this development primarily to the cultural impact of historicism.
16
7
almost complete evaporation of this intellectual tradition and its influence.18 The primary
reasons for it were economic and practical: universities were too financially strapped to
field full theological faculties; students were serving in the army or otherwise engaged;
the attention of the nation was focused elsewhere. Still, the “slave question” was for
Baptists an issue of biblical interpretation above all else. In the exegetical dispute just
prior to the war, slavery proponents and abolitionists both attempted to base their
positions on a scriptural foundation.
Although material in both testaments could be used to support both sides in the
dispute, it is fair to say that the clearest support for the pro-slavery position could be
extracted from the Old Testament, while the most compelling evidence for the antislavery argument could be located within the New. For pro-slavery voices like Richard
Fuller, the decisive point in the debate was the Old Testament’s approval of slavery and
New Testament’s failure to condemn it.19 Writing in response, the abolitionist Francis
Wayland argued that the writers of the New Testament had neglected to condemn slavery
outright only because it had been too culturally established to criticize openly. In his
view, the New Testament writers instead gave expression to higher principles, confident
that over time such principles would serve to undermine and erode the cultural practice.
For Wayland, the oft-cited examples of polygamy and divorce (which by contrast were
also sanctioned in the Old Testament but explicitly condemned in the New) did not prove
that slavery was still divinely approved, as Fuller held, but rather that over time there had
been a greater human approximation to the ways of God in terms of both moral
sensitivity and social organization. From Wayland’s perspective, the abolition of slavery
thus represented the unfinished work of the New Testament and was in keeping with its
deeper spirit, even if that work went beyond its actual letter.20
“By the time of the Civil War,” writes Mark Noll, “Northern ministers… had
begun to place greater weight on the New Testament.”21 Although Noll draws this
conclusion within a discussion of millennialism, and is not discussing Baptist tradition in
particular, his impression of a general shift of emphasis is telling. There were certainly
many factors that led to a hermeneutical tilt toward the New Testament in the North, but
it seems likely that the issue of slavery was one of them. This tilt was especially
significant in light of the fact that the Old Testament had always had such a central role
in Puritan society and within the self-consciousness of New England. Noll again: “Well
18
Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in American, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), esp. 180–82 (??).
19
The famous debate of letters between Fuller and Wayland was published as Richard Fuller and Francis
Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York: Lewis Colby, 1845). I owe
this example to Edward R. Crowther, “‘According to Scripture’: Antebellum Southern Baptists and the Use
of Biblical Text, American Baptist Quarterly 14 (1995): 288–305. Crowther provides a helpful portrayal of
how U.S. Baptists in the North and South read Scripture in somewhat divergent ways during the pre-civil
war period, although they also still held many points in common. Where I am going beyond Crowther’s
analysis, however, is in attempting to view this situation in light of how ante-bellum Baptists were relating
the two testaments of the Christian Bible, either explicitly or implicitly.
20
Crowther is quite interesting on the way in which cultural factors and theological convictions encouraged
a greater tendency toward literalism in the South, while in the North a Romantic hermeneutics led to a
spiritualizing and rationalizing of the biblical text. Crowther calls this divide “the emergence of sectional
hermeneutics” and views it as a factor that contributed to the coming national conflict (pp. 302–03).
21
Mark A. Noll, “The Image of the United States as a Biblical Nation, 1776–1865,” in Hatch and Noll,
Bible in America, 39–58; 44.
8
into the national period, the public Bible of the United States was for all intents the Old
Testament.”22 Even after the demise of Puritanism as a coherent religious tradition, its
typological logic, according to which America was seen as a mirror-image of biblical
Israel, survived securely within public awareness and discourse as an authorizing civil
myth. But as Old Testament interpretation became more difficult—because of slavery,
because of the rise of historical-critical awareness, because of the tradition of New
Testament primitivism,23 because of the new millennialist sentiment aroused by the Civil
War—the place of the Old Testament in Baptist theology became ever more ambiguous
and Baptists in the North came broadly to favor the New Testament.
By this claim, I do not intend to dismiss the countless Old Testament sermons
preached in northern Baptist churches, nor do I dispute that during the second half of the
nineteenth century northern Baptists in their theoretical statements about Scripture
continued to ascribe full authority to the Old Testament. What I have in mind is the more
subtle way in which a portion of Scripture can function in a given tradition as a kind of
“canon within the canon,” or authoritative hermeneutical center, both by drawing the
most interpretive attention and by sometimes trumping other portions of Scripture in
order that a particular theology can be funded with biblical authority.
The official move toward a New Testament “canon within the canon” in the
Northern Baptist Convention culminated at the 1922 convention in Indianapolis. When
the fundamentalist wing of the convention sought adoption of the old New Hampshire
Confession of Faith as a means of asserting doctrinal control over the denomination’s
schools and seminaries, the majority of convention delegates instead passed a resolution
stating, “The Northern Baptist Convention affirms that the New Testament [!] is the allsufficient ground of our faith and practice, and we need no other statement.”24 At the
time, no other mainline denomination was being threatened as badly in the
Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as the Northern Baptist Convention.25 The move
to restrict the denomination’s doctrinal center of authority to the New Testament alone
was a pragmatic gambit made in the hope of achieving the broadest possible consensus
and staving off a potential split.
As the focus of the dispute between liberals and conservatives shifted to the way
in which missionaries were appointed, a 1925 denominational study commission
characterized the practice of the mission board as following an “inclusive policy” with
respect to its appointment of missionaries, namely, that “it would appoint and retain
missionaries of varying theological beliefs provided they came within certain limits
which the Board regarded as ‘the limits of the gospel.’”26 The convention’s response to
the study commission’s report, despite further conservative criticism and a renewed call
Noll, “Image,” 45.
See further Robert T. Handy, “Biblical Primitivism in the American Baptist Tradition,” in Richard T.
Hughes (ed.), The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1988), 143–52.
24
As cited in Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson Press, 2003), 401.
Leonard provides a brief but helpful sketch of the incident and its historical context.
25
Winthrop S. Hudson, Baptists in Transition: Individualism and Christian Responsibility (Valley Forge,
Penn.: Judson Press, 1979), 120–21. The Northern Baptist Convention changed its name to “American
Baptist Convention” in 1950; a further reorganization created the designation “American Baptist Churches
in the U.S.A.,” which is how the denomination is known today. This is my own denomination.
26
As cited in Torbet, History, 432.
22
23
9
for an explicit doctrinal statement to which missionaries could be held accountable, was
to affirm the Board’s “inclusive policy” and cite as a precedent the 1922 Indianapolis
resolution affirming reliance on the New Testament alone.
The action regarding missionaries at the 1925 Seattle convention occurred at the
same time as another decision was made in response to concern over the practice of open
membership by some churches. Here again there was a move to use the New Testament
as a creedal substitute, with a resolution passed defining a Baptist church as “one
accepting the New Testament as its guide and composed of only baptized believers,
baptism being by immersion.”27 That the convention had in effect rejected open
membership with this resolution provided some consolation to conservatives; yet the
broadening of the earlier Indianapolis resolution to cover missionary policy, church
membership and even ecclesiology itself established the idea of “the New Testament
only,” now also known as “the inclusive policy,” in the very heart of denominational life.
In 1933 a number of conservatives left the denomination anyway, forming the General
Association of Regular Baptist Churches. Still, the “inclusive policy” has had a
significant afterlife within northern Baptist churches, functioning as a kind of “canon
within the canon,” a denominational glue, a boundary stone of identity.
Contemporary American Baptists will likely find this description too extreme.28
Certainly the Old Testament enjoys lively use in many American Baptist churches today,
especially in some lectionary-based churches and in many African-American
congregations. Yet I can still recall a standardized Church Covenant, procured from a
denominational printing source and found on the inside front cover of the hymnal of
several churches I knew growing up, with its reference to the New Testament (!) as “the
only authoritative guide for faith and practice.”(??) The standard wording for an
American Baptist church covenant no longer includes that statement but the ambiguous
status of the Old Testament has not thereby been resolved. Even where the Old
Testament has secured a firm place in American Baptist worship, I would argue, its
theological status and message are still profoundly disconnected from American Baptist
theology and identity. If early Baptists expressed a high view of the Old Testament in
their explicit doctrinal statements but in practice often treated the New Testament as if it
was more authoritative than the Old, contemporary American Baptists have inherited an
Old Testament that is officially diminished even as they continue to try to preach and
teach it within their churches.
In a recent press release from the Baptist World Alliance, General Secretary
Denton Lotz spoke of the need for Baptists to “affirm the great New Testament [!]
doctrines and historic confessions of faith.”29 So perhaps the ambiguous status of the Old
Testament is in fact a wider, even international, Baptist phenomenon.
27
As cited in Torbet, History, 433.
As Crowther notes (“‘According to Scripture,’” 303), at the time of the Civil War both northern and
southern Baptists, in spite their other differences, tended not only viewed the Genesis creation narrative as
authoritative but as historical. I am sure that this view can be found in varying degrees among northern
Baptists right down to the present day.
29
Press Release, Baptist World Alliance, March 10, 2005.
28
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The Genesis of the Southern Dispute
In the American South, a great difficulty with the Old Testament also arose in the
twentieth-century, but the shape of the problem was different, reflecting the distinctive
history and social realities of southern Baptists.30 In contrast to the situation in the north,
mid-nineteenth-century biblical interpretation in the South had been more literalistic and
legalistic.31 In a telling comparison, southern Baptist leaders of the day viewed the
reading of novels with great suspicion, for it was thought to encourage too great an
elasticity in words, a kind of rhetorical antinomianism.32 In contrast to the situation in the
North, the exegetical debate over slavery served to solidify and harden a reading of both
testaments in which the words of Scripture were held to be plain to understand and
directly applicable to the life of the believer because they expressed God’s unchanging
moral law.33 No northern Baptist would have objected to the idea that Scripture was
directly applicable to daily life, but northern Baptists tended toward a hermeneutics that
one scholar has described as follows: “By looking at a collage of Bible verses, reflecting
upon one’s conscience, and comprehending the material signs of progress all around… a
religious truth [could be found] greater than the sum of its revealed and discerned
parts.”34 For southern Baptists, to adopt such a pragmatic reading strategy was simply to
substitute human reason for God’s word.
Southern Baptists reaffirmed, with some revisions, the New Hampshire
Confession at their annual convention in 1925. This action took place against the
background of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and represented an opposite
reaction from what the northern Baptists had done. Some voices in the South resisted the
move toward having a denominational confession, calling for the Bible alone to be
recognized as the sole source of information about right faith and order, but they were
overruled.35 Still, the report of the committee, chaired by E.Y. Mullins, found it necessary
not only to recommend a confession for adoption, it also presented five principles
For a broad treatment of this theme, with excellent bibliography, see James Leo Garrett, Jr., “The
Distinctive Identity of Southern Baptists vis-à-vis Other Baptists,” Baptist History and Heritage 31 (1996):
6–16.
31
Crowther, “‘According to Scripture,’” 297. While this judgment can fairly stand, I think, it is also
possible to overstate the difference between northern and southern Baptist hermeneutics. At least one other
scholar has levied the charge that biblical interpretation in the South was not exclusively focused on
Scripture as the prime authority for ethical decisions, which sounds very much like the charge Crowther
makes against biblical interpretation in the North. So Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: Social History of
Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 16 (??), alleges Southern
Baptists “fully supported the prevailing racist views of Southern whites throughout the late nineteenth
century. Arguing from the Bible, history, science, instinct, and observation, they proclaimed the eternal
supremacy of the white race…” That is hardly biblical literalism.
32
Crowther, “‘According to Scripture,’” 291–92.
33
The point is put even more strongly by Jesse C. Fletcher, “Effect of the Civil War on Southern Baptist
Churches,” Baptist History and Heritage 32 (1997): 44, “Theologically, Southern Baptist churches were
indelibly marked. First of all, the biblical selectivity and exegetical proof-texting that were pressed into
service for slavery and then segregation continue to dominate…”
34
Crowther, “‘According to Scripture.’” 297. This description is exaggerated to a degree but adequately
conveys the flavor of northern Baptist biblical interpretation, at least as practiced by more elite pastors and
academic theologians. Moreover, it is quite accurate as an indication of how northern Baptist biblical
interpretation was perceived among southern Baptists.
35
Estep, “Baptists,” 601.
30
11
explaining how “confessions of faith” was properly to be understood. The first of these
principles defined confessions as “a consensus of opinion of some Baptist body, large or
small, for the general instruction and guidance of our own people and others concerning
those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us. They are not
intended to add anything to the simple conditions of salvation revealed in the New
Testament[!], viz., repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour and
Lord.”36 This principle thus not only sought to split the difference between adherence to
Scripture and adherence to a confession of faith, it also betrayed the same hermeneutical
elevation of the New Testament as was familiar within northern Baptist tradition. To be
sure, the committee report went on to affirm “that the sole authority for faith and practice
among Baptists is the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments,” but the exact status of
the Old Testament was not in this way clarified.37
Against the background of this theological heritage, the later twentieth-century
dispute over biblical inerrancy in the Southern Baptist Convention can be viewed with
greater sensitivity. Although Southern Baptist biblical interpretation might be broadly
characterized as more literalistic than biblical interpretation among Northern Baptists, it
was neither monolithic nor unaware of a deep tension between Scripture and confession.
It is all too easy to caricature advocates of inerrancy as simply unsophisticated or
authoritarian, partly because examples of both qualities abound in the writings and oral
comments of those who have participated in the recent “conservative resurgence” within
the Southern Baptist Convention. Yet a searching investigation of the conservatives’
position reveals that more fundamental to their argument are a deep distrust of human
reason and a healthy appreciation of the human capacity for sin.38 The conservatives have
consistently understood, in a way that liberals often sufficiently neglected to examine,
how ingeniously human reason can justify the relaxation of Scripture’s importunate
challenges.
It was precisely this suspicion of reason that lay behind the first more recent
broad-scale dispute between conservatives and liberals in the Southern Baptist
Convention. Interestingly enough, this dispute centered on the interpretation of the Old
Testament, with southern conservatives subjecting to severe criticism Ralph Elliott’s
book, The Message of Genesis, published in 1961 by the Southern Baptist publishing
house of Broadman Press.39 Elliott had suggested that the first eleven chapters of the
book of Genesis should be read as theological story but not literal history. He also
affirmed the legendary quality of the rest of the book, although he affirmed its ultimate
basis in history. But because he did not hew to the blanket historicity of every aspect of
the Genesis narrative, Elliott was excoriated by the conservatives, who sought to have
him fired from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and his book banned. Neither
initiative was immediately successful, and so the controversy dragged on from 1961 to
Estep, “Baptists,” 601.
Estep, “Baptists,” 602.
38
Cf. the awareness of this point already in the nineteenth century in Crowther, “‘According to Scripture,’”
298–99.
39
Ralph H. Elliott, The Message of Genesis (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1961). The fact that Elliott’s
volume appeared in an “official” Southern Baptist publishing organ was central to the controversy. For a
well-researched account of the entire incident, see Jerry L. Faught II, “The Ralph Elliott Controversy:
Competing Philosophies of Southern Baptist Seminary Education,” Baptist History and Heritage 34
(1999): 7–20.
36
37
12
1963, embroiling the denomination in the dispute and galvanizing conservatives’
resistance to what they viewed as the threat of modernism. In the end, Elliott did lose his
job, not as a direct consequence of the views in his book, but because after Broadman
Press had ceased printing his book he had sought, against the explicit direction of his
dean, to have it republished with another press.40 In the course of the affair there were
increasing calls for the Southern Baptists to formulate a confessional statement that
would give guidance to the denomination, especially to its seminaries and professors.
1963 saw the passage of the Southern Baptist Convention’s first “Faith and
Message” statement, another revision of the 1833 New Hampshire Confession.
Revealingly not a single seminary president or professor was a member of the committee
who drafted the statement.41 The first article of the Baptist Faith and Message of 1963
significantly redescribed Scripture as “the record of God’s revelation of Himself to man”
and closed by adding, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus
Christ.” These formulations involved both a distancing and a focusing in response to the
fundamentalist threat that had arisen. As opposed to the idea that Scripture is the word of
God (such language appears, for example, in the Second London Confession), here
Scripture was said to be the record of God’s words and actions in history. This telling
shift is a concession in the direction of historical criticism and reflected the biblical
theology movement of the 1950s and 60s. The idea of a christological criterion for
biblical interpretation sounded “conservative” but actually represented the same kind of
lowest common denominator bid for agreement that the “New Testament only”
formulation had represented in the North. As it turned out, the attempt to find a
consensual center would not succeed in the South either.
Just a few short years afterwards, the flagship volume in the new Broadman Bible
Commentary series, another treatment of Genesis by respected British Baptist Old
Testament scholar G. Henton Davies, ignited a further storm of protest because of its
historical-critical approach.42 In this case, however, conservative objection had less to do
Davies’s treatment of the historicity of the Genesis narrative and more to do with his
specific exegesis of Genesis 22, the account of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac.43 Although Davies recognized that some interpreters continued to attribute
this command literally to God, he himself rejected that line of argument, asking
rhetorically, “Indeed what Christian or humane conscience could regard such a command
as coming from God?”44 Instead, Davies psychologized the narrative, viewing Abraham’s
40
For historical treatments of the incident and its importance in light of subsequent events within the
Southern Baptist Convention, see Leonard, Baptist Ways, 414; Jerry L. Faught II, “Round Two, Volume
One: the Broadman Commentary Controversy,” Baptist History and Heritage 38 (2003), 94–114, also
posted online at: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_mONXG/is?1?38/ai_99430508; Walter B.
Shurden, Not a Silent People: Controversies That Have Shaped Southern Baptists (updated ed.; Macon,
Geo.: Smyth and Helwys, 1995), 69–81. For Elliott’s own later reflections on the incident, see Ralph H.
Elliott, The “Genesis Controversy” and Continuity in Southern Baptist Chaos: A Eulogy for a Great
Tradition (Macon, Geo.: Mercer University Press, 1992).
41
Instead, the committee was comprised of the presidents of the Southern Baptist state conventions.
42
The first volume also contained introductory general articles and an exposition of the book of Exodus by
another professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Roy L. Honeycutt. It was originally
published as Clifton J. Allen (ed.), The Broadman Bible Commentary: Volume 1, Genesis–Exodus (12
vols.; Nashville: Broadman Press, 1969).
43
Interestingly, the interpretation of Genesis 22 was, however, disputed in the Elliott controversy as well.
44
As cited in Faught, “Round Two,” 98. Faught provides an excellent treatment of this entire episode.
13
discovery of the ram trapped in the thicket as Abraham’s mental realization that he had
previously been mistaken about God, as his release from a psychological
misapprehension about the nature of God and faith, in which up until this point he had
been existentially trapped. The theological framework of progressive revelation out of
which Davies worked had already been commonplace in British theology for some
time.45 For Southern Baptists conservatives, however, the sticking point was the
interpretive distance such a construct opened up between the literal level of the text and
its theological construal. Did God tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac or not? And if God did
not, why does Scripture say that God did? Does not Scripture then become a wax nose,
able to be bent into any form one pleases?
Clark Pinnock published a stern rebuke to Davies’s treatment of Genesis in
Christianity Today, calling for other Baptists to express their disapproval as well.46
Pinnock alleged that there were a number of other defective aspects in the volume as
well, chief among which was the introductory article on scriptural inspiration authored by
general editor Clifton Allen.47 The ensuing storm of controversy engulfed the 1970
Denver convention, in which the delegates ultimately voted to request that the Baptist
Sunday School Board direct Broadman Press to withdraw the first volume of the new
commentary series and ensure that it be rewritten from a more conservative stance.
Although Davies was initially approached about revising the volume and indicated his
willingness to do so, giving more space to alternative views, conservative pressure
eventually ensured that a new author was chosen. Clyde T. Francisco, who taught at
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, agreed to rewrite the exposition of Genesis,
which was then published in 1973 as Volume 1, Revised.48
In many ways these two controversies over the interpretation of Genesis became
the first two shots fired in what turned out to be a lengthy battle for control of the
denomination.49 How Southern Baptists dealt with the substantive issues in the debate—
and in certain ways simply postponed dealing with them50—established a precedent and a
pattern for later disputes and developments.51 For the purpose of this essay, I would like
to suggest that it was no accident that such debates focused on the difficulty of
interpreting the Old Testament because of the intrinsic ambiguity of the Old Testament
within Baptist tradition. If some Baptists like Henton Davies emphasized the controlling
authority of the New Testament over the Old in a way that had long roots in Baptist
belief, other Baptists like those in the conservative wing of the Southern Baptist
Convention wished to maintain the traditionally high view of all Scripture despite any
challenges. In a sense, it would have been more helpful if Southern Baptist liberals had
See John Rogerson, “Progressive Revelation: its History and its Value as a key to Old Testament
Interpretation,” Epworth Review 9 (1982): 73–86.
46
Clark Pinnock, “First of a New Series,” Christianity Today (December 5, 1969): 17 (??).
47
Faught, “Round Two,” 98.
48
Faught, “Round Two,” 103–05.
49
Faught, “Elliott Controversy,” 7. Slayden A. Yarbrough, “Academic Freedom and Southern Baptist
History,” Baptist History and Heritage 39 (2004), 55, points out that the interpretation of Genesis was also
partly at issue in the even earlier dispute over the teaching of C.H. Toy at Southern Seminary. On the Toy
controversy, see Phyllis R. Tippit and W.H. Bellinger, Jr., “Repeating History: The Story of C.H. Toy,”
Baptist History and Heritage 38 (2003), 19–35; esp. 35 n. 69, where a similar point is also made.
50
Walter Shurden, “The Problem of Authority in the SBC,” Review and Expositor 75 (1978): 219–34; 225
(??).
51
Faught, “Elliott Controversy,” 18.
45
14
seen fit to explain why Horton Davies’s way of treating Genesis 22 did not torpedo a
fully robust doctrine of Scripture and if Southern Baptist conservatives had been able to
engage openly and forthrightly the critical problems involved in biblical interpretation
(e.g., questions of historicity, inspiration, etc.).
Yet that kind of debate never really happened in any broad, public way within
Southern Baptist life and is still precluded from transpiring because of the fragility of a
situation in which extreme views continue to dominate and are relatively uninterested in
finding middle ground. The reality is that Southern Baptists do not have a fully coherent
doctrine of Scripture, not one that can deal successfully with the historical complexities
of Scripture’s literary formation anyway, and their situation is no different in this regard
than that of American Baptists, American evangelicals or mainline Protestants generally.
What is different about Southern Baptist conservatives, however, is that they refuse to
allow anyone to admit the problem. That spirit of refusal has had a chilling effect at many
Southern Baptist institutions and within many Southern Baptist churches.52 It also has the
effect of pushing those who see things differently to adopt more extreme counterpositions than they otherwise might have reached if there had been room for genuine
dialogue. Young people who grow up in Southern Baptist churches are unlikely ever to
hear critical questions being raised about Scripture and its interpretation. The irony is
then that very often those young people attend colleges and universities, perhaps even a
school with a Southern Baptist heritage, take a class on the Bible, are confronted with the
kind of history-of-religions approach to Scripture now at home in Religious Studies
departments almost everywhere and find they have almost no conceptual resources to
make the transition from their upbringing to their education. The resulting tension
frequently leads students to imagine their hermeneutical situation to be an either/or: either
read the Bible as a believer (which they take to mean pietistically and apart from any
critical engagement) or as an unbeliever (which they understand to mean reading that is
critically and historically careful and alert!).
Now that I am teaching at a divinity school in the Southeastern region of the U.S.
in which the second largest student group is Baptist, most of whom are coming from a
broadly Southern Baptist background, this state of things takes on an existential
importance for me. The student profile I have described is the profile of the typical
Baptist student who arrives on the first day of my introductory Old Testament course, as I
begin my attempt to teach the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, in order to equip
students with the knowledge and skills they will need as pastors to use Scripture well
within their future churches. In effect, I have to reconnect the two worlds of discourse
and concern that Baptists students have already learned to view as mutually exclusive.
The Promise of Retrieval
I have attempted to make the case that the Old Testament is distinctively
ambiguous in Baptist tradition, both because of the way in which the logic of Baptist
convictions has possessed a built-in tension from the beginning and because of the
intensification of that tension in subsequent Baptist history. In some ways, the
interpretation of the Old Testament is not any more fraught in Baptist tradition than it is
See Morris Ashcraft’s foreword to Elliott, “Genesis Controversy”, xv–xvi. Cf. Joel F. Drinkard, Jr. and
Page H. Kelley, “125 Years of Old Testament Study at Southern,” Review and Expositor 82 (1985): 7–19.
52
15
within Christian tradition broadly. The parallels with the debate over the Old Testament
within Protestant evangelicalism during the past several years are especially close.53
Moreover, an increasing amount of attention is presently being paid in a variety of
academic circles to the question of how to reinvigorate the theological interpretation of
Scripture, of the Old Testament as well as of the New.54 Yet this kind of constructive
project has not so far had much response in Baptist life.55 Part of the challenge, it seems
to me, is to reformulate a theological approach to Scripture that will draw upon Baptist
roots and distinctives, while at the same time avoiding the particular pitfalls that have
gone hand in hand with those roots and distinctives. In an effort to take a first step in that
direction, I am going to look more closely at how three Baptist figures from the past have
read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture and ask what their way of reading may
have to contribute to the contemporary situation. I have chosen these specific figures
because in my judgment they each interpreted the Old Testament in a manner that was
identifiably “Baptist,” that is, related to a distinctively Baptist vision, and because the Old
Testament was in some way central to the character and explication of that vision. The
three figures are Roger Williams, Helen Barrett Montgomery and H.H. Rowley.
An Exilic Hermeneutic
Roger Williams (1603?–1683) was hardly a committed Baptist churchman.
Although he developed baptistic convictions after fleeing the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
and helped to found the first Baptist church in America in what would become
Providence, Rhode Island, he then left that congregation the following year.56 Yet
Williams did not lose his sympathy for the Baptists of Rhode Island colony57 and he
continued to articulate a recognizably Baptist perspective in seventeenth-century New
England, one that has been highly influential for later Baptists and for U.S. history
generally, even though it has also been muted and distorted at times.
In many ways, Williams shared as much with his Puritan compatriots as he
differed with them.58 He was disgusted with the Church of England and the distance
53
Westminster Seminary, for example, has experienced recurring debates over questions such as Mosaic
authorship of the Pentateuch. For a courageous effort to engage critical questions without abandoning the
framework of evangelical convictions, now see Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and
the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005).
54
See especially Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2003) and the annual volumes published by the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar, beginning
with Craig Bartholomew, Colin Greene and Karl Möller (eds.), Renewing Biblical Interpretation (Carlisle:
Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000).
55
One helpful sign, however, is an increasing interest in the history of Baptist biblical interpretation; see,
for example, volume 38 of Baptist History and Heritage (Winter, 2003), devoted to the theme “Baptists and
the Old Testament.”
56
Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Library of Religious Biography;
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 90–98.
57
Gaustad, Liberty, 115.
58
See further, C. Leonard Allen, “Roger Williams and ‘the Restauration of Zion,’” in Hughes, American
Quest, 33–49. Allen anticipates Byrd’s argument by viewing the disagreement between Williams and the
Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony as a disagreement about the kind of biblical archetypes that
should be applied to the New England community. Allen is simply wrong, however, in stating that
Williams only found an applicable pattern for communal life in the New Testament, as opposed to the Old
16
between its practices and those of the church described in the New Testament. He held
Scripture above church tradition and undertook the journey into the New World so that he
could follow Scripture more closely, both as an individual and as member of a purified
religious community. The fundamental difference between Williams and the Bay
Colony’s Puritan leadership, however, lay in Williams’s perception that the health of the
church depended upon a quality of personal commitment and response that could not
legislated. It was a perception born out of his awareness of religious persecution and his
minority-status experience earlier in England. The more the need for personal
commitment is stressed theologically, the more a “gathered-church” ecclesiology appears
to be an appropriate way to maintain and reinforce that kind of commitment. The more a
“gathered-church” ecclesiology is accepted, the more the practice of believers’ baptism
makes sense. Williams’s theological development can be charted along just these lines.
Puritan leaders were also led in this direction, but they would eventually attempt
to enforce a compromise, known as the “Halfway Covenant,” that would inconsistently
and unsatisfyingly join together a “gathered-church” ecclesiology with the practice of
infant baptism. However, the most telling aspect about the Halfway Covenant is that it
had to be enforced. Williams saw this very problem in advance. For Williams, if personal
commitment is basic to the Christian life and to the structure of the church, then church
and society must allow believers the freedom to develop that commitment, which by its
very nature cannot be legislated or compelled. To be sure, this will make for a messy,
frustrating situation in which Christians change their minds about things and the civil
state is unable to depend upon a stable church with a consistent body of beliefs and
practices. But it is, Williams insisted, the only way in which personal commitment can
take root, be strengthened and remain robust. The effort to compel religious belief must
be seen for what it is: violence; and against this kind of violence, no less than against
physical violence and warfare, the warnings and promises of Scripture must be directed.
“A religion cannot be true which needs… instruments of violence to uphold it,” Williams
wrote.59
For the Puritan leaders, not only was there an acceptable role for the civil
magistrate to play in legislating Christian practices, there was a deep persuasion of their
chosenness within God’s contemporary action in the world. How else, after all, were they
to understand their providential deliverance from religious persecution in England and
their secure establishment in New England as God’s people? Naturally, then, when they
looked to Scripture their closer analogue or type in many ways appeared to be that of Old
Testament Israel rather than that of the New Testament church. The Old Testament
provided the necessary blueprint for the building of a chosen community of the faithful in
which the will of God would permeate all of life and direct the community’s steps. To
this day, when one sees the personal names in New England cemeteries, or reads
Hawthorne and Melville, or looks at the names of the towns on a New England roadmap,
one is powerfully reminded of the extent to which the analogy with Israel was
fundamental and basic for the Puritans.
(p. 34), as Byrd makes bountifully clear. Allen’s essay is still quite helpful in delineating the primitivistic
features of Williams’s theology and their New Testament basis.
59
Williams, Complete Writings (7 vol.; New York: Russell and Russell, 1963) 3:139; cited in James P.
Byrd, Jr., The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible (Macon,
Geo.: Mercer University Press, 2002), 6.
17
Until quite recently, it was thought among leading historians that Williams broke
with New England’s Israel analogy, replacing it with an analogy between the
contemporary church and the primitive New Testament church.60 While this conceptual
replacement has been celebrated for breaking with the religious authoritarianism of the
Puritans and introducing the idea of the separation between church and state into
American history, it has also been criticized for its devaluation of the Old Testament and
its supersessionist tendency.61 In a very important corrective work, Baptist historian
James Byrd has argued that Williams’s supersessionism has been overexaggerated and
that his use of the Old Testament is much more vigorous and illuminating than has ever
been sufficiently recognized.62
Central to Byrd’s view is that William’s most important hermeneutical move was
not typology but rather “exemplary exegesis” or use of scriptural example.63 Williams
actually made profound use of the Old Testament in this way, but the kinds of exampletexts he selected are also highly instructive. Where the Puritans looked to Moses and the
kings of Israel as realistic examples of Christian leadership, drawing a positive analogy
between the theocratic dimension of Israel’s existence and their own civil state, Williams
found negative examples of the civil state in the same Old Testament narratives. For
instance, he saw the civil state depicted as persecutor of the faithful in 1 Kings 21 (the
account of Naborth’s vineyard) and in Daniel 3 (the account of the story about
Nebuchadnezzar and the fiery furnace).64 Williams read 1 Kings 21 as an episode of
religious hypocrisy within Israel and saw Daniel 3 as relating an instance of religious
persecution by a pagan monarch.65
Williams’s different examples did not come about by chance but grew out of his
thorough-going Christology. For Williams, the life, death and resurrection of Christ had
changed something substantial about the way that the people of God were to live as
faithful individuals and as the faithful people of God.
Unlike his adversaries… Williams did not focus on the passages in which the
ancient Hebrews governed themselves through national covenants with God. As
Williams recognized, the Old Testament is not exclusively a narrative of conquest
60
Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contributions to the American Tradition (New York: Atheneum,
1962); Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation (London/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1974); idem, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wis.: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978). Miller did not view the Puritans as having a theological openness to scriptural
typology. He conceived of Williams as introducing a notion of typology in contrast to Puritan leaders like
the Cottons and the Mathers who worked instead within a framework of covenant theology. In making his
case, Miller offered a treatment of Williams that emphasized much more than nineteenth-century
scholarship had done the importance of biblical interpretation for Williams’s thought. Bercovitch’s
contribution was to show the prevalence of scriptural typology throughout Puritanism, however, so that the
debate between Williams and the Puritans was recognizably a debate between two different ways of
delineating a typology between Scripture and the community. For further discussion of Miller and
Bercovitch, as well as of the history of scholarship on Williams generally, see Byrd, Challenges, 26–27;
37–38; 42–43 (??).
61
Miller, cited in Byrd, Challenges, 39.
62
Byrd, Challenges, 55–56. The following discussion of Williams’s views is very much indebted to Byrd’s
pioneering work.
63
Byrd, Challenges, 48.
64
Byrd, Challenges, 58.
65
For the details of Williams’s treatments of both passages, see Byrd, Challenges, 71–84.
18
that depicts the dominance of Israel’s kings over pagan nations and the victories
of David, Solomon, and Josiah. Much of the Old Testament describes eras of
defeat and exile when God’s people were in bondage to foreign rulers and Israel’s
national covenant was violated and powerless. Williams argued that these
passages closely resembled the situation of the people of God since the coming of
Christ. Williams recognized that the New Testament described God’s people in
control of churches, not civil states. In contrast to God’s rule through kings in the
Old Testament, God’s great leaders in the New Testament were humble disciples,
leaders in the church, not worldly kings and emperors. Indeed, Williams pointed
out that, in the New Testament, God’s people were often enemies of the state. The
supreme example was Jesus, who was prosecuted as a criminal and executed by
the Roman Empire.66
In this way, as Byrd persuasively demonstrates, Williams was not clumsily opposing the
Old Testament to the New in the doing of his theology. Instead, he was mounting a
sophisticated argument for how the Old Testament should best be read in light of the
person and work of Jesus Christ.
For Williams, while the Old Testament remained, and ought to remain,
authoritative Scripture, there was also a movement by God in history depicted by both
testaments, and this salvation-historical movement provided the hermeneutical lens
through which both testaments could best be read and applied. From this perspective, it
was an interpretive error to see Israel’s governmental structures as realistic examples for
contemporary emulation because they were nowhere to be found in the New Testament.
Instead, the New Testament had transformed those structures into a spiritual entity, the
church, governed by Christ.
Williams did think that there were some positive examples of civil power in the
Old Testament. Strikingly, however, he selected for those examples the pagan rulers who
had granted the people of Israel a measure of respect and religious liberty. The Persian
emperor Artaxerxes, as depicted in Ezra 7, was his favorite.67 Once again, the Puritans
had viewed Artaxerxes simply as a positive example of a civil ruler invested with
religious power, no matter that he was not an Israelite but a Persian. For Williams,
however, that difference was precisely the crucial point. Artaxerxes was not an Israelite,
so he was not invested with true religious power at all! He was not be viewed as a
theocratic example, although he could still be considered a useful political role model—
for the separation of church and state, and religious liberty! In Williams’s treatment
Artaxerxes becomes a just ruler who did not require his subjects to submit to one
particular faith. Ironically, for the Christian church Artaxerxes was an even more relevant
model for emulation than the Israelite kings precisely because Israel’s national covenant
was no longer in effect.68
Williams’s reading of Daniel 3 acknowledged the very real danger that pagan
rulers could represent as well. What was striking in his treatment of this narrative was not
that he drew an analogy between the three righteous friends and contemporary Christian
believers—such an analogy is customary in traditional Christian interpretation—but that
66
Byrd, Challenges, 57.
Byrd, Challenges, 58.
68
Byrd, Challenges, 66–67.
67
19
he equated Nebuchadnezzar with the Puritan hierarchy of New England!69 Their
banishment of him and others for reasons of conscience, as well as their disrespectful
treatment of Native Americans, clinched the analogy.70 For Williams, the true Christian
church was a disestablished church, one much more like the exilic people of Israel
depicted in the later narratives of the Old Testament than the socially ordered and
governmentally organized Israel of Moses or Solomon. The people of Israel in exile were
law-abiding and irenic whenever possible, but they did not bow down to the state in
matters of conscience, no matter how much the rulers of the state made idols of
themselves by pretending to possess a religious authority from God (that God in fact had
not granted to them).71 Williams was convinced that such pretense could not help but
result in religious hypocrisy, since religious rulers had to hold to the rhetoric and form of
the gospel they claimed to represent, yet resorted to coercion and violence when their
claim was in any way challenged because they did not actually make their decisions
according to the gospel’s precepts.72
What all of this brings out quite clearly, and it is to Byrd’s great credit to have
done so, is that the Old Testament was neither unimportant nor incidental to Williams’s
theological project. If he was to succeed with his critique of Puritan theology, then it was
absolutely essential for him to criticize it on its own strongest ground. The Old Testament
was the foundation for the regnant political theology of New England; only by
interpreting the Old Testament’s political relevance differently could Williams offer a
compelling alternative to the social compact of Massachusetts Bay Colony. As the
spiritual body of Christ in the world, Christians should continue to read the Old
Testament as authoritative Scripture, but they should read it through the lens of the great
change that Christ had wrought, the disestablishment from worldly dominion.
Interestingly, with this perspective Williams adumbrates the later use of the Old
Testament by, among others, the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder.73
A Missional Hermeneutic
Helen Barrett Montgomery (1861–1934) was a missionary, a philanthropist, an author
and the first woman to be president of a mainline Protestant denomination, the Northern
Baptist Convention (1921–22). She also holds the distinction of being the first woman to
publish her own translation of the New Testament, known as the “Montgomery” or
“Centenary” translation.74 Moreover, Montgomery and Lucy Peabody, another significant
69
Byrd, Challenges, 73.
For further discussion of Williams’s views about the Native Americans, see Byrd, Challenges, 74–75.
71
Byrd, Challenges, 77–78.
72
Byrd, Challenges, 83–84. This debate was usually framed in terms of the “civil magistrate” and his
responsibilities. For an early Baptist statement of support for the civil magistrate, see the Second London
Confession, Chap. 24.
73
John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Evangelical and Political (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1997).
74
The translation was done to mark the American Baptist Publication Society’s hundredth anniversary in
1924. For a full discussion of Montgomery’s accomplishment, see Sharyn Dowd, “Helen Barrett
Montgomery’s Centenary Translation of the New Testament: Characteristics and Influences,” Perspectives
in Religious Studies 19 (1992): 133–50.
70
20
Baptist figure, began what later became the World Day of Prayer.75 Although she has
gotten short shrift in some Baptist histories,76 she has received increasing attention from
scholars who are interested in feminism,77 social reform,78 missions79 and New Testament
interpretation.80 It is indeed thrilling to find a Baptist woman from the early twentieth
century writing: “Jesus Christ is the great Emancipator of women. He alone among the
founders of the great religions of the world looked upon men and women with level eyes
seeing not their differences, but their oneness, their humanity… In the mind of the
Founder of Christianity there is no area of religious privilege fenced off for the exclusive
use of men.”81 At that same time, because of statements such as this and because of her
work in New Testament translation, Montgomery’s distinctive handling of the Old
Testament has for the most part gone unnoticed.
This handling is most evident in her book The Bible and Missions, in which she
sought to sketch out the biblical basis for contemporary missionary activity on the part of
the church.82 At the beginning of that work, Montgomery criticizes and rejects an
approach to the Bible that fixes on isolated verses and reads them out of context. This
sort of practice, she implied, had led to the neglect of missions, but reading the entirety of
the biblical witness could not help to lead to a renewed emphasis on missions because of
the Bible’s “unmistakable drift.”83 Furthermore, the literary character of the Bible
rendered it uniquely capable of serving a missionary purpose84 and its teachings
throughout describe a “missionary” plan on the part of God.85 This plan is “found in germ
in the Old Testament and… fully developed in the New.”86 While “other sacred books”
tell of the human search for God, “the Bible records God’s search for man for the purpose
of redemption and fellowship with himself.”87 What is particularly striking about
Montgomery’s working out of this theme is the way that she roots this idea of God’s
“plan” or “search” first in the Old Testament and then employs it to establish continuity
between the Old Testament and the New.
Within the Old Testament, she was also able to relate each of its literary sections
to the idea of an “unfolding plan,” allowing for development and change at the same time
that she was describing continuity. “The Pentateuch plants itself squarely on Theism, and
that in itself is a fundamental missionary message,”88 she began, going on to offer
William H. Brackney, “The Legacy of Helen B. Montgomery and Lucy W. Peabody,” International
Bulltetin of Missionary Research (1991): 176.
76
For examples, see Dowd, “Montgomery’s Centenary Translation,” 134 n. 4.
77
Carolyn DeArmond Blevins, “Women in Baptist History,” Review and Expositor 83 (1986): 59–61.
78
T. Furman Hewitt, “Mining the Baptist Tradition for Christian Ethics: Some Gems,” Perspectives in
Religious Studies 25 (1998): 76–77.
79
Brackney, “Legacy.” See also Laceye Warner, “Kingdom Witness and Helen Barrett Montgomery’s
Biblical Theology,” Review and Expositor 101 (2004): 451–71.
80
E.g., Dowd, “Montgomery’s Centenary Translation.”
81
Helen Barret Montgomery, “The New Opportunity for Baptist Women,” The Baptist (August 25, 1923):
944–45, as cited in Brackney, “Legacy,” 177.
82
Helen Barrett Montgomery, The Bible and Missions (West Medford, Mass.: Central Committee on the
United Study of Foreign Missions, 1920).
83
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 7.
84
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 8–14.
85
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 14–17; 51.
86
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 14.
87
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 16.
88
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 17.
75
21
comments on the topics of creation and law. But the heart of the Old Testament’s
“missionary message” is located by Montgomery in the story of Abraham, the “story of
the choice of a man, a family, a nation, to be Jehovah’s servant for the world,” the story
of “enlarging circles of blessing.”89 In this way, the “story” of the entire Old Testament
becomes the drama of Israel’s election. The extent to which Israel is successful in
bringing blessing to all the nations of the world becomes the hermeneutical key to
reading individual books and passages. Similarly, “the central sin of Israel” becomes “its
failure to discern the meaning of God’s election of his Servant Nation.”90 Although in the
end, Israel’s mission is judged a tragic “failure,” Montgomery is careful to note that the
Greeks and Romans were also ultimately unsuccessful in their efforts to improve the
world and that, so far, the church has also “failed… to interpret her own worldwide
mission.”91 Furthermore, Israelite poets and story-tellers continued to be concerned about
non-Israelites in the latter periods of Israel’s history, despite the narrowing focus of
Israelite law and legal interpretation.92 Even more important was the contribution of the
prophets, for the purpose of the prophets can now be interpreted as the effort to hold
Israel accountable to its universal task and purpose of its election.93
In this way, the establishment of the overarching theme of election enables
Montgomery to find a high degree of unity within the Old Testament’s highly diverse
contents: “Here are writings separated by centuries, composed under circumstances the
most diverse written by men of varied gifts and capacities, yet all so assembled about one
master idea that no sense of violence is felt when all are gathered together in one
volume…”94 It is largely a reading of the Old Testament as a story that Montgomery
pursued, adumbrating recent proposals to employ a “narrative hermeneutics” with respect
to Scripture. However, as the previous citation makes evident, Montgomery was also able
to accommodate a degree of historical awareness in the course of her treatment. So, for
example, she admitted that the “missionary meaning” of the historical books was less
apparent than that of other books in the Old Testament, turning to historical scholarship
for an explanation: “If the theories of the modern school of interpreters are correct, these
are for the most part earlier writings in which the missionary understanding of Israel’s
mission is naturally less clear.”95 Also, while it was the case that development in Israel’s
understanding had occurred over time, it was also true that “the structure of the Old
Testament is not linear, but rather on four parallel lines covering somewhat the same
periods of time with differing emphases.” Montgomery further explains, “Thus, the
prophets accompany the poets, and they the historians, over a great part of Israel’s
pilgrimage. But while Chronicles narrates the story from the ecclesiastical point of view,
the prophets are reacting to the same Providences in the light of spiritual and universal
applications of the moral law.”96 This move in the direction of locating differing voices in
the Old Testament, some of which challenge and even disagree with each other, involves
89
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 19.
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 21.
91
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 22.
92
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 26–27.
93
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 31–50.
94
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 16.
95
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 24.
96
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 32.
90
22
a more supple and modern hermeneutics, which Montgomery employed effectively in
pursuit of her theme.
It also means that Montgomery maintained a sensitivity to those voices in the
biblical text that represented the perspectives of minorities and outsiders. In a manner
different from that of Roger Williams, Montgomery was also able to resist simply
valorizing the status quo presented by certain Old Testament texts in favor of a fuller and
more robust appreciation of the Old Testament story as a whole. Through her attention to
counter-establishment voices, as well as through her focus on missions as the heart of the
biblical witness, then, Montgomery models a way of reading Scripture that is highly
representative of traditional Baptist concerns.97
Montgomery did not originate this missional approach to the Old Testament
herself. In many ways, her interpretations are simply classic Christian readings of the Old
Testament; more proximately, she was drawing upon the work of other scholars writing
at the same time.98 Yet she not only popularized their ideas, she also exhibited how well
those ideas fit within a framework of Baptist belief and practice.
A Critical-Confessional Hermeneutic
One of the remarkable features of Baptist tradition in Britain has been its long and
impressive roster of highly regarded Old Testament scholars: H. Wheeler Robinson, T.H.
Robinson, H.H. Rowley, G. Henton Davies, R.E. Clements, and Rex Mason, just to name
a few.
H.H. Rowley (1890–1969) is probably the best known among them, achieving an
international reputation in his day and leaving a rich heritage of publications and fieldoriented initiatives.99 From 1949 until his retirement in 1959, he was Professor of Hebrew
Language and Literature at the University of Manchester. He wrote widely, taught
influentially and worked diligently to build up the field of Old Testament studies, not
least through his reviews in the Expository Times and his creation of an annual book list
for the Society for Old Testament Study, the British association of Old Testament
scholars.100 That book list is now published annually for an international audience and
represents an indispensable tool for Old Testament research.101
Rowley’s particular focus-areas of research included the book of Daniel and
biblical apocalyptic, the history of early Israelite traditions and Christian missions.102
Although these areas might sound fairly unrelated to each other, R.E. Clements has made
97
On missions as a distinctive Baptist concern and practice, see Robinson, Life and Faith, 108–22; Torbet,
History, 522–23.
98
For example, among other resources listed in her bibliography she credits William Owen Carver,
Missions in the Plan of the Ages (New York: Revell, 1909) and Robert F. Horton, The Bible a Missionary
Book (Edinburgh: Oliphant, 1908). An excerpt from Carver’s book is also cited in Montgomery, Bible and
Missions, 20–21; citations from Horton’s volume are found in Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 27; 28;
30.
99
For overviews of Rowley’s contributions and evaluations of their lasting significance, see R.E. Clements,
“The Bible Scholarship of H.H. Rowley (1890–1969),” Baptist Quarterly 38 (1999): 70–82; idem, “The
Biblical Theology of H.H. Rowley, 1890–1969,” Baptist History and Heritage 38 (2003): 36–63.
100
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 71; 79.
101
The Society for Old Testament Study (SOTS) Book List now appears as the summer issue of the
Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.
102
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 72.
23
a strong case that each one was related to the others and that Rowley’s interest in all of
them grew out of his Baptist upbringing and convictions.103 One need only recall that
Daniel had long been viewed in non-conformist circles as providing a roadmap of the
latter days, which in turn had lent a rationale and a sense of urgency to Christian
missionary activity.104 Although Rowley fully accepted the results of late nineteenthcentury historical critical scholarship, which to varying degrees called into question the
historicity of the Genesis narratives, he mounted very forceful arguments for the
historicity of Israelite traditions beginning with Moses and the Exodus. For Rowley, it
was the moral insights of these traditions that formed not just the foundation of the Old
Testament but the foundation of the Christian gospel itself. Christianity represented an
ethical advance within world history and an account of that advance therefore required a
historical basis, which Rowley found in the Old Testament.
In a way that is highly reminiscent of Helen Barrett Montgomery, Rowley then
used the category of missions as the means by which to recount the history of the Old
Testament’s ethical development, focusing on the vocation of the people of God to serve
all the nations of the earth.105 In this regard his more popular books, Israel’s Mission to
the World and The Missionary Message of the Old Testament, showed how his various
interests and research topics fit together within a unified reading of the entire Old
Testament.106 Distinctively, Rowley emphasized the importance of the Suffering Servant
figure found within the book of Isaiah, both for missions and for ecclesiology. It was in
the form of the Suffering Servant that God’s blessing would finally come to all of the
world’s people; it was in the form of the Suffering Servant that the Christian church
received the clearest indication of its true shape and character for its activity within the
world. Here again, in a way that is different from both Roger Williams and Helen Barrett
Montgomery, and yet not entirely dissimilar, Rowley developed an anti-triumphalistic
and anti-establishmentarian hermeneutic for reading the Old Testament and the Bible as a
whole.
Thus, all of Rowley’s interrelated interests exhibited is an intensely confessional,
even apologetic, Christian scholarship that was nevertheless also passionately committed
to open, fair and accurate academic discourse. Clements describes Rowley’s interests as
illustrating “how much he sought to be a ‘biblical scholar’ with a Bible that contained
two Testaments, rather than resting content with being a Hebraist or an ancient historian.
They show how seriously he viewed the bond between a balanced and careful historical
criticism and the Protestant-evangelical faith. This meant treading a path between a rigid
fundamentalism, which Rowley believed resisted the essential critical-historical
component of faith, and an unevaluated historicism, which saw only past facts and no
contemporary groundwork for faith.”107 The key insight in such a perspective, according
to Clements, was Rowley’s conviction that “Faith that disregarded a serious and rigid
historical criticism was no true faith.”108 In other words, since for Rowley the Christian
gospel itself entailed historical claims, there was no essential contradiction between
Clements, “Biblical Theology,” 36–38.
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 73.
105
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 75.
106
H.H. Rowley, Israel’s Mission to the World (London: SCM, 1939); idem, The Missionary Message of
the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth, 1945)
107
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 76.
108
Clements, “Biblical Scholarship,” 80.
103
104
24
history and faith. “Since a real history lay at the heart of the Bible, to have denied such
critical investigation would have been tantamount to conceding that its record of
redemption may not be true after all.”109 It was precisely for this reason that Rowley
invested a significant portion of his time in the publication of more popular works, in
addition to his scholarly writings. He was eager for the devotional life of ordinary
Christians to be enriched by a great acquaintance with the Old Testament and to be
guided by the best and most up-to-date Old Testament scholarship.
Clements also maintains that Rowley was not opposed to other kinds of
approaches to the Old Testament, above all the work of Jewish scholars and others who
sought to study the Hebrew Bible nonconfessionally. But Rowley “saw his own work…
as an exercise in Christian ministry and teaching, and his task as the exposition of the
‘Old Testament,’ rather than of the ‘Hebrew Bible’ in a nonconfessional context. He
believed the two approaches could and should be related to each other, and he saw no
strangeness in his own approach.”110 In this way, Rowley represented a confessional form
of interpretation that was also generous, pluralistic and anti-hegemonic in principle.
In light of contemporary Old Testament study, the most striking characteristic of
Rowley’s work may well be his willingness to take up questions that were the questions
of ordinary believers and bring the whole scope of his expertise to bear in responding to
them, while at the same time utilizing clear and straightforward language. So, for
example, one finds discussions of the Bible’s “relevance,” “inspiration” and “use.”111
Rowley also offers discussions of God, sin, the person and work of Christ, the cross and
the sacraments, just to name a few more doctrinal topics.112 In these various instances,
Rowley poses questions about those things that ordinary believers want to know, rather
than allowing the agenda of the biblical guild to dictate his choice of writing projects.
Conclusions
I hope this discussion has made clear not only something of the distinctive
approaches to the Old Testament in Baptist tradition represented by Roger Williams,
Helen Barrett Montgomery and H.H. Rowley, but also that all of these three approaches
share something like a “family resemblance” of interpretive concerns, interests, choices
and aims.113 In all three cases these interpreters insisted on the importance of the Old
Testament for Christian faith and practice. They all resisted more theocratic readings of
the Old Testament that would place the church on the side of the powerful in
contemporary society. They all interpreted the Old Testament together with the New,
uniting both testaments within a common framework of mission and purpose, yet without
the loss of the Old Testament’s ability to continue to give instruction and guidance to
contemporary Christians. They all presented their views to a variety of Baptist
Clements, “Biblical Theology, 42.
Clements, “Biblical Theology,” 61.
111
For these themes, see H.H. Rowley, The Relevance of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
112
These topics can be found in H.H. Rowley, The Unity of the Bible (London: Kingsgate, 1953).
113
I mean the term “family resemblance” in the slightly more technical sense used by Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe; 2d ed.; Oxford/Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997)
66, of “overlapping and criss-crossing” similarities. Recently this term has also been employed as way of
finding continuity in traditional Christian biblical interpretation by Brevard S. Childs, The Struggle to
Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
109
110
25
constituencies, including academics, pastors, and laypeople, as well as to non-Baptist
audiences.
To be sure, there are also shortcomings apparent with each of the interpreters as
well. In spite of the newly-recognized reliance of Williams on the Old Testament, at
times he can still be seen to lean in a supersessionist direction. What of those Old
Testament passages that Puritans favored and Williams chose to ignore? Are there
portions of the Old Testament that simply can no longer function as Christian Scripture?
In order to beat the Puritans at their own game, Williams would have had to find a way to
interpret the more theocratic texts, too, and yet perceive in them a different kind of
witness. (Interestingly, this is now what recent Anabaptist/Mennonite criticism of Yoder
is now trying to do.114)
Montgomery resists reifying the status quo in her account of the Old Testament
by seeking to recognize and maintain the relative independence of the various Old
Testament voices and their ability to subvert and challenge one another. Yet in her
eagerness to have Christianity compare favorably with other world religions, she often
conflates church and Western culture, underwriting American nationalism and the idea of
“Christian nations.”115 For Montgomery, Christianity and “civilization” conflate in
worrisome ways.
Rowley relied upon a developmental historicism that he inherited from A.S.
116
Peake. His notion of the Bible’s “dynamic unity” not only entailed a historical
development from the Old Testament to the New,117 it also maintained that “Not a little in
the Old Testament is superseded in the New, and even where there is no explicit
supersession Christians recognize that whatever is alien to the spirit of Christ and His
revelation has no validity for them.”118 The difference between Rowley’s version of
progressive revelation and other accounts was that it was still revelation that modulated
in history rather than human understanding:
...it is not to be supposed that development was brought about by the unfolding of
the human spirit through the mere passage of time. There is no automatic spiritual
growth of mankind, and the Bible nowhere tells the story of such growth… It
See Waldemar Janzen, “A Canonical Rethinking of the Anabaptist-Mennonite New Testament
Orientation,” in Harry Huebner (ed.), The Church as Theological Community: Essays in Honour of David
Schroeder (Winnipeg, Man.: CMBC Publications, 1990), 90–112; A. James Reimer, “‘I came not to
abolish the law but to fulfill it’: A Positive Theology of Law and Civil Institutions,” in Ben C. Ollenburger
and Gayle Gerber Koontz (eds.), A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s
Contributions to Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking (Telford, Penn.: Cascadia; Scottdale, Penn.: Herald,
2004), 245–73.
115
Montgomery, Bible and Missions, 195.
116
Rowley not only followed Peake at Manchester, he also helped to bring out a new edition of Peake’s
highly influential one-volume Bible commentary. Now see M. Black and H.H. Rowley (eds.), Peake’s
Commentary on the Bible (London/New York: Routledge, 1990). As Rogerson describes it (“Progressive
Revelation”), it was Peake’s Commentary that provided Britons with a third alternative to the seeming
either/or between Wellhausen and fundamentalism that obtained in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth
century. However, this third way involved a conception of progressive revelation that threatened to save the
Old Testament by turning it into a kind of pre-history to the New, an earlier stage of understanding that
pointed ahead to Christ but no longer
117
Rowley, Unity, 7.
118
Rowley, Unity, 14.
114
26
does not tell how men by the exercise of their minds wrested the secrets of life
and the universe from a reluctant Unknown, but how God laid hold of them and
revealed Himself through them. If God was revealing Himself, then there should
be some unity about revelation… There is still room for diversity, since God was
revealing Himself to men of limited spiritual capacity and could only reveal to
each what he was capable of receiving.”119
This is the theological idea of divine accommodation, known already in writings of early
Christian theologians. The remaining question, however, is whether such a hermeneutical
framework can do full justice to the Old Testament in its present role as canonical
Scripture for the church. Is not the Old Testament also God’s word for today and not only
God’s word of yesterday? And what is now to be discounted in the Old Testament as the
work of “men of limited spiritual capacity”?
Moreover, in order to paint a fully accurate picture, this study would need to be
expanded further. It would also be necessary, for example, to reflect on the use of the Old
Testament by those Baptist figures such as Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), who saw the moral passion of the Old Testament
prophets at the very center of the Christian gospel.120 Such an “ethical hermeneutic,” it
could also be shown, also has parallels and echoes in the work of Williams, Montgomery
and Rowley. Baptists have always been concerned about ethics, and while some Baptists
have focused their ethics on the Sermon on the Mount others have formed their ethical
ideas largely on the foundation of the Hebrew prophets.
Yet even with these further qualifications and the necessity for further work, the
Old Testament interpretation modeled by Williams, Montgomery and Rowley shows that
such interpretation can done in ways that are integrally related to Baptist distinctives and
practices. In thinking about Baptist education, then, there are several conclusions to be
drawn. First, Baptists will have to resist the widespread move in the academy toward a
disciplinary structure in which “Christian Scripture” equates with teaching of the New
Testament and “Hebrew Scripture” with the teaching of the Old. There must be a
disciplinary location for Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, even as that kind
of interpretation is questioned and interrogated from within the tradition. But to treat the
Old Testament as “someone else’s mail” means to give up something crucial within
Baptist life and to relinquish a precious portion of the Christian heritage.
Second, there needs to be an awareness and a respect on the part of Baptist
scholars of ordinary believers’ concerns and questions, and a willingness to respond to
those concerns and questions. The reality of disciplinary specialization and the pressure
of the tenure process within the U.S. educational system both work actively against the
posing of larger questions in general, not to mention the posing of theological questions
within biblical studies. It is difficult at present to think of many highly-regard biblical
scholars who are willing to write on the kind of topics that Rowley once did (e.g.,
inspiration, revelation, the cross, the Christian sacraments). Baptist schools can support
and encourage such work of their faculty; Baptist conventions and churches can solicit
119
Rowley, Unity, 7–8.
For brief discussions of both of these figures in light of their contributions to Baptist ethics, see Hewitt,
“Mining,” 72–76; 77–79. Hewitt does not, however, take up in any detail the topic of their Old Testament
interpretation.
120
27
such treatments from Baptist scholars. But Baptist scholars themselves need to be aware
of the need for that work and its importance for the life of Baptists and Baptist churches.
Third, there must also be a willingness on the part of ordinary believers (and
denominational officials!) to hear Old Testament scholars out, with charity and with
respect. If history is to be a guide, then Old Testament interpretation may be especially
inclined to meet with hostility because of its potential to subvert more familiar ideas and
to give voice to minority positions. This is not to say that Old Testament scholarship does
not deserve the most thoughtful and vigorous response or counter-argument. But it is to
plead for interpretive charity and the goal of a generous orthodoxy, even as Baptists
continue their rough-and-tumble searching of Old Testament Scripture.121
121
I would like to thank Curtis Freeman for being a stimulating conversation partner as I worked on this
essay, Mandy McMichael for her suggestion that I consider Helen Barret Montgomery as one source of the
retrieval I was attempting and Laceye Warner for her help in my investigation of Montgomery’s Old
Testament hermeneutics.