The Formulation
of Baptist Confessions of Faith
While both General and Particular
Baptists have their roots in the Protestant Reformation, certain distinctive
emphases peculiar to Baptists distinguished them from other Protestants. These Baptist
emphases include the principle of a regenerate church membership, believer’s
baptism upon an individual’s profession of faith, congregational church
government and discipline, a wider fellowship through membership in
associations, protection of the autonomy of the local congregation, and freedom
to obey God.[1]
This, according to Torbet, “represented a distinctly minority viewpoint
concerning the nature of the visible church. It was this witness that
distinguished Baptists from most Protestants.”[2]
On certain occasions Baptists were compelled
to write confessions of faith that both identified similarities and differences
between them and some of the other Protestants. Concerning Baptist confessions,
McBeth wrote, “These have usually been hammered out on the anvil of some
doctrinal dispute. They express consensus and, thus, rarely satisfy extreme
partisans on either side.”[3] A
sketch of the formulation of Baptist confessions of faith should aid in understanding
that while there are differences of opinion among Baptists concerning
soteriology, they nevertheless can and do work together.
Helwys wrote “A Declaration of Faith of
English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland” to distinguish his
congregation from that of John Smyth which had sought admission among the Mennonites
(Anabaptists) at the Amsterdam Waterlander Church.[4] The
confession written by Helwys was not for the purpose of being unfriendly with
the Mennonites but for the purpose of asserting the validity of the baptism of
his congregation and for preserving its independent organization and identity.[5] By
distinguishing themselves from Smyth’s group in this confession, Hewys’ group
also distinguished themselves from the Mennonites. They were anti-Arminian in
their view of sin and the will and rejected other Mennonite emphases such as
“prohibitions against oaths, the bearing of arms, participation in government,
and having dealings with excommunicants.”[6]
Although the confession written by
Helwys was anti-Arminian in its view of sin, the will, and anti-anarchy, it was
also anti-Calvinistic on the doctrine of the atonement.[7] However
this did not stop Baptists from being accused of Pelagianism and anarchy, both
of which were associated with Continental Anabaptists.[8] These
circumstances led the Particular Baptists to produce a confession of faith. The
first Particular Baptist confession, the First London Confession, was drawn up
to distinguish the Particular Baptists from both the Anabaptists and the
General Baptists and to identify their similar theological beliefs with the
prevalent Calvinism of the nation.[9]
The First London Confession, written in
1644, was superseded by the Second London Confession of 1677. The Second London
Confession was revised in 1688 and published in 1689. The Second London
Confession was in agreement with the soteriology of the Westminster Confession
of the Presbyterians but it differed by emphasizing religious liberty and
baptism by immersion.[10]
The historical context that provided the
impetus for the Second London Confession was the renewal of persecution of
dissenting groups by the Church of England. The Presbyterians had been the
dominant group under the Commonwealth and had success in defying the
Conventicle Act. As a result, Baptists and Congregationalists formed a united
front with the Presbyterians through a show of doctrinal agreement among themselves.
So the Particular Baptists of London made the Westminster Confession the basis
of their new confession to show solidarity between them, the
Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, although it was modified to meet Baptist
emphases.[11]
This new Particular Baptist Confession of faith, the Second London Confession,
became very influential and was adopted by Baptists in Philadelphia and
Charleston.[12]
Shortly after the Particular Baptists
published their new confession, the General Baptists followed suit and drew up
their Orthodox Creed “to unite and confirm all true protestants in the
fundamental articles of the Christian religion.”[13]
One of its purposes was to refute Hoffmanite Christology, a teaching that Jesus
did not have a human body but was a divine being with angelic flesh.[14]
Lumpkin noted that the Orthodox Creed came closer to Calvinism than any other
General Baptist confession. He said, “Perhaps, indeed, the Creed is principally
noteworthy as an early attempt at compromise between the two great systems of
theology, thus anticipating the work of Andrew Fuller and others of the latter
eighteenth century.”[15]
In America the Second London Confession
of the Particular Baptists was destined to give theological direction to
American Baptists.[16] As
already mentioned, the Philadelphia Confession was an adoption of the Second
London Confession by the Philadelphia Association. However, the Calvinism of
the Second London Confession would begin to be modified in subsequent
confessions among American Baptists especially after Andrew Fuller of England
“significantly altered the doctrine of the atonement and helped break the hold
Calvinism exerted over the Baptists.”[17]
There is some disagreement as to whether
Fuller in his modification of Calvinism is to be viewed as teaching a general
or particular atonement. Richards saw Fuller’s modified Calvinism as a
rejection of one of its fundamental assumptions, namely, particular or limited
atonement. Richards also noted that Thomas J. Nettles placed Fuller in the
Calvinistic camp and that Nettles showed Fuller’s orthodox Calvinism.[18]
The fact remains though, that after Fuller modified the Calvinistic doctrine of
the atonement, subsequent Baptist confessions of faith in America began to take
on a more moderate Calvinism. In particular, two confessions that gained wide
acceptance among Baptists in America, the Principles of Faith and Practice of
the Sandy Creek Association and the New Hampshire Confession of Faith, both of
which reflected a moderate Calvinism.[19]
McBeth stated, “The first covenant of the Sandy Creek church reflected a
moderate Calvinism, including particular election of grace by the
predestination of God.”[20]
It was some twenty-nine years later, from 1816 when the Sandy Creek Association
adopted its first covenant to 1845 when it adopted its second covenant, that
the early Calvinism of the Sandy Creek Association gave way to more emphasis on
human freedom and responsibility.[21]
The New Hampshire Confession was a restatement of Calvinism in moderate tones
by the New Hampshire Convention.[22] According
to Torbet the New Hampshire Confession was drawn up to offset Arminian teaching
in New England.[23]
Lumpkin agreed and saw it as a restatement of Calvinism in moderate tones to
offset the message of the Free Will Baptists that was being received with
enthusiasm.[24]
The New Hampshire Confession of Faith
was the most widely dispersed confession of American Baptists.[25] Before
the rise of the New Hampshire Confession, Baptist churches in the south usually
adhered to the Philadelphia Confession of Faith as their major doctrinal
statement.[26]
As a new mood of missionary expansion developed in the nineteenth century, the
Philadelphia Confession receded in its adherence and the New Hampshire
Confession began to gain wide acceptance among Baptists in America reflecting
the missionary spirit of the age.[27]
In 1925 the Southern Baptist Convention
revised the New Hampshire Confession by adding ten new sections and published
it as the Baptist Faith and Message.[28] The
historical context that gave impetus for the 1925 BFM was twofold having both
external and internal reasons that led to this confession. Externally, after
World War I, Southern Baptists sought to restore communications with the Baptists
of Europe. Internally, there was a controversy over evolutionary theory instigated
by J. Frank Norris, the primary leader of the Fundamentalist movement in the
South, who accused Southern Baptists of “teaching biological evolution in their
colleges, tolerating ‘modernistic’ views of Scripture in their seminaries, and
making an idol of the denomination in their churches.”[29]
These circumstances revealed the need for a more complete doctrinal statement
among Southern Baptists. The 1925 BFM was the result.
In 1963 the 1925 BFM would be revisited
and ultimately revised into what would become the 1963 BFM. Two internal
controversies gave rise to the 1963 BFM. The first internal controversy giving
rise to the revision of the 1925 BFM was the “apostasy controversy at Southern
Seminary.”[30]
Dale Moody, Theology Professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
“taught the possibility that one truly saved could fall from the state of grace
and lose his or her salvation.”[31] This
teaching was deemed inconsistent with traditional Southern Baptist views on the
subject.[32]
The second internal controversy giving rise to the 1963 BFM was the Elliot
controversy. This controversy “all but eclipsed the Moody controversy.”[33]
Ralph Elliot, a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote The Message of Genesis at the invitation
of the Sunday School Board’s Broadman Press. Many of Elliot’s liberal views
that questioned the Mosaic authorship of the Penteteuch and much of the
historical accuracy of Genesis brought into light the liberal viewpoints that
were being taught in the seminaries.[34]
In response to these controversies the
Southern Baptist Convention at the 1962 assembly in San Francisco adopted a
motion to form a Committee to study the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message.[35]
The Committee was chaired by Herschel Hobbs, the president of the Convention.[36]
Hobbs had the enormous task of preserving the organic unity of the Convention
and of satisfying the conservative base that sound doctrine would be taught in
the schools and published by the Sunday School Board.[37]
Smith correctly observed, “These competing demands led to the formulation of
the 1962 Committee on Baptist Faith and Message. These competing demands . . .
also resulted in a doctrinal statement which allowed for wider latitude of
interpretation among Southern Baptists.”[38]
Therefore, the 1963 BFM with its wider latitude of interpretation among Southern
Baptists led to another internal controversy in the subsequent years and
ultimately to the Conservative Resurgence and the adoption of the 2000 BFM.
Since the 1963 BFM included language
that allowed wider latitude of interpretation for the purpose of preserving the
organic unity of the Convention, an ensuing controversy over biblical
interpretation erupted. Richards succinctly summarized the central issue that
led to the adoption of the 2000 BFM. He said:
When the 1963
version was adopted, it included language that was not to clarify what was
believed, but which was made more broad and general so as not to exclude
anyone. The difficulty with this was the ability to attach different meanings
to words, so that two groups could use the same terminology, but have different
meanings. This was central to the issue during the Conservative Resurgence.
Finally, in 1999, T. C. Pinkney of Virginia made a motion to the Southern
Baptist Convention to ask the president to appoint a committee to consider a
revision of the 1963 document.[39]
These
two opposing groups are generally labeled as either moderates or conservatives.[40] Their
major differences were over inerrancy, the doctrine “that the original
manuscripts, generally referred to as ‘autographs,’ were without error and that
the Bible is true in all respects.”[41] Ultimately
this led to the Conservative Resurgence, a battle between Moderates who held to
a nonliteral interpretation of the Bible and Conservatives who held to a
literal interpretation of the Bible.[42]
The moderates holding to a nonliteral
interpretation of the Bible were also in control of Convention affairs. Both
sides were agreed on this assessment. Nancy Ammerman wrote:
Both moderates
and fundamentalists agreed that moderates had been the people most active in
Convention affairs for the previous generation. Fundamentalists said that
moderates had staked out their territory—in part based on seminary
connections—and had excluded fundamentalists from participation. Moderates
thought that fundamentalists were merely showing their lack of interest by
staying away.[43]
In
the hands of the moderates the SBC schools were drifting into liberalism.[44]
The SBC took a major turn with the election
of Adrian Rogers as Convention president in 1979.[45]
If the SBC were going to change it had to start with its president. The
president was the key to the entire appointment and nomination process by which
trustees were given oversight of the denomination’s agencies.[46]
With the election of Adrian Rogers as
the SBC president, 1979 marked the beginning of the Conservative Resurgence in
the SBC. Dan Martin for Baptist Press wrote, “His election was regarded
as the opening gun in a campaign to turn the 14.4-million-member denomination
to a ‘more conservative’ direction.”[47]
The conservatives succeeded in sustaining electoral victories, controlling
convention meetings and controlling the appointment and election of trustees
that were charged with governing the agencies and institutions of the
denomination.[48]
By 1986, the conservatives were able to begin setting the policies that would
change the SBC entities. Without the Conservative Resurgence, Jerry Sutton says
that “the Southern Baptist Convention would have found itself drifting to the
left and eventually would have been in the same anemic theological condition as
the mainline Protestant denominations, powerless to effect change in our
spiritually starving world.”[49]
The conservatives won control of the SBC
by setting their sights on the Convention’s infrastructure.[50] The
Conservative Resurgence that began in 1979 culminated with the revision of the
1963 BFM in the year 2000. The BFM 2000 consisted of eleven primary revisions
that displayed theological solidarity with both the 1963 and 1925 versions and
closed the unintended theological loopholes that resulted from the imprecise
language of the previous versions.[51]
Although charges were made, that the 2000 BFM was a move away from the
theological heritage of Southern Baptists, its theological solidarity with its
predecessors proved otherwise.[52]
The history of the formulation of
Baptist confessions of faith reveals not only diversity in soteriological
viewpoints among General and Particular Baptists but also several modifications
that allow for both liberty of conscience and unity of labor by both groups.
This in no way implies that Baptists are doctrinally loose. Instead, there is a
mutually beneficial symbiotic benefit that arises from both General and
Particular Baptists working together. L. Russ Bush and Tom J. Nettles noted
that “the diversity of theological ideas within the Baptist framework has kept
Baptists from becoming theologically stagnant.”[53] However,
before they began to cooperate, both General and Particular Baptists did become
theologically stagnant.
[1] R. Albert Mohler Jr., Southern
Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future, “Is There a Future?,” edited by
David S. Dockery (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2009), 26-27; Torbet, History of Baptists, 31. Mohler only
identified the emphases of a regenerate church membership, believer’s baptism,
and congregational church government.
[2] Torbet, History of Baptists, 31.
[3] McBeth, Heritage, 677.
[4] Torbet, History of Baptists, 36.
[5] William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley
Forge: Judson Press, 1959), 114.
[6] Lumpkin, Confessions, 115.
[7] Lumpkin, Confessions, 115.
[8] Lumpkin, Confessions, 144.
[9] Lumpkin, Confessions, 144-145;
Torbet, History of Baptists, 45.
[10] Richards, Winds, 18.
[11] Lumpkin, Confessions, 235-236; Richards, Winds,
37.
[12] Richards, Winds, 11.
[13] Lumpkin, Confessions, 295.
[14] Lumpkin, Confessions, 41, 295. Lumpkin identified Melchior Hoffman with
Docetic Christology (41).
[15] Lumpkin, Confessions, 296.
[16] Torbet, History of Baptists, 213.
[17] Richards, Winds, 45.
[18] Richards, Winds, 55-58.
[19] Richards, Winds, 46.
[20] McBeth, Heritage, 229.
[21] Lumpkin, Confessions, 357; McBeth, Heritage,
229.
[22] Lumkin, Confessions, 360.
[23] Torbet, History of Baptists, 514.
[24] Lumpkin, Confessions, 360.
[25] Lumpkin, Confessions, 361; Richards, Winds,
46.
[26] McBeth, Heritage, 242, 677.
[27] McBeth, Heritage, 677; Richards, Winds,
45-46.
[28] Lumpkin, Confessions, 361; McBeth, Heritage,
677; Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and
Message, 102.
[29] McBeth, Heritage, 677.
[30] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 19.
[31] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 19-20.
[32] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 19.
[33] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 22.
[34] Richards, Southern Baptists, 6878 of 9258.
[35] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 37.
[36] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 154,
[37] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 39.
[38] Smith, 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, 39.
[39] Richards, Southern Baptists, 7494 of 9258.
[40] Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious
Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 1995), ix. Ammerman preferred the terms
fundamentalists and moderates rather than conservatives and moderates.
[41] Richards, Southern Baptists, 6999 of 9258.
[42] Richards, Southern Baptists, 7013 of 9258.
[43] Ammerman, Battles, 156.
[44] Timothy C. Seal, “A Comparative
Analysis of the Theological Heritage of the 2000 Revisions to the ‘Baptist
Faith and Message’ in Relation to the 1963 and 1925 Confessions,” (PhD.
Dissertation, Mid-America Theological Seminary, 2003), ProQuest Dissertations
and Theses, http://search.proquest.com/pqdthss/docview/305248265/13A2745AE96D42ECB7/4?accountid=133490
accessed August 14, 2012, 18.
[45] David S. Dockery, Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal: A Biblical, Historical, and
Theological Proposal (Nashville: B & H Academic,
2008), 10.
[46] Ammerman, Battles, 168.
[47] Dan Martin for Baptist Press,
“Rogers Willing to be Nominated” in The Christian Index: The Georgia Baptist
Convention News Magazine (April 17, 1986), 3.
[48] Ammerman, Battles, 212.
[49] Jerry Sutton, The Baptist
Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,
(Nashville, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2000), 3.
[50] Ammerman, Battles, 215.
[51] Seal, “2000 Revisions,” 1-3.
[52] Timothy Seal made a scholarly
case in his dissertation, “A Comparative Analysis of the Theological Heritage
of the 2000 Revisions to the ‘Baptist Faith and Message’ in Relation to the
1963 and 1925 Confessions,” that no theological deviation occurred in the 2000
BFM.
[53] L. Russ Bush and Tom J. Nettles,
Baptists and the Bible: The Baptist
Doctrines of Biblical Inspiration and Religious Authority in Historical
Perspective (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 18.
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