By Walter B. Shurden

This is a book by Baptists. Most Baptists, especially Baptists of the South, will readily recognize the writers—Russell Dilday, Keith Parks, James Dunn, Catherine Allen, Charles Wade, David Currie, Charles Deweese, John Pierce, Kenneth Massey, Bruce Prescott, Earl Martin, and editor Robert O’Brien. Marinated in the Baptist tradition of a free and responsible conscience, each of these writers carries a sterling Baptist portfolio. They deserve to be heard. They should be heeded.

This is also a book about Baptists. Specifically, it is a book about the Southern Baptist Convention and its deliberate, but unbaptistic, move toward creedalism. Inherent in this embrace of creedalism has been a theological and organizational hardwiring of the denomination. The Southern Baptist Church, an unbaptistic animal that W. W. Barnes warned of in a prophetic book of 1934,1 emerges out of the shadows of Baptist congregationalism, even amid much talk of the autonomy of the local church. This theological hardwiring, as Russell Dilday notes in his chapter, has a note of strict Calvinism in it, unfamiliar to most Southern Baptists. In the face of the theological creedalism and the organizational centralization, the writers of these chapters call for freedom of conscience for all Baptists, but especially for SBC missionaries.

Three “C” words dominate this book: Creedalism, Centralization, Conscience. The message of this book is about denominational centralization. It is about conscience, especially freedom of conscience, an historic Baptist principle, as it struggles in the face of both creedalism and centralization. The primary concern of the writers of this book, however, is the first “C” word: creedalism. Anyone who denies that the Southern Baptist Convention has evolved from an anti-confessional to a pro-creedal denomination either does not know or intentionally distorts Southern Baptist history. Here are the six stages of the evolution of creedalism within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Stage one: The SBC opposed the adoption of a confession of faith of any and every kind. When the founders of the SBC met in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845 to form the SBC, they deliberately refused to adopt any previous Baptist confession of faith. It is true that Baptists before them had adopted such doctrinal statements. It is also true that groups of Southern Baptist people, such as associations and institutions, adopted confessional statements during the nineteenth century. However, the SBC intentionally rejected not only creeds but also confessions of faith in 1845. “We have constructed for our basis no new creed; acting in this matter upon a Baptist aversion for all creeds but the Bible.”

In 1846, only one year after the SBC was organized, William B. Johnson, the first president of the SBC, wrote a little book that few Southern Baptists have ever heard of. He called it The Gospel Developed through the Government and Order of the Churches of Jesus Christ. One of Johnson’s major arguments in his book is that a local Baptist church is a Christocracy. A church is a body of believers ruled by Christ.

Because Baptist churches are Christocracies, Johnson argued that Baptists do not need confessions of faith. Please read, slowly and carefully, the following words of one of the most prominent Southern Baptists at the formation of the SBC: “Keeping this first principle in view, that Christ is the one Lord of his people, and has given the revelation of his will in a complete and perfect code of laws and precepts, the impropriety of having any human selection and compilation of these, as a standard of faith and practice, is manifestly evident. If it be said that the compilation thus prepared contains what is in the Bible, the question comes up, why then form the compilation? Why not use The Bible as the standard? Can man present God’s system in a selection and compilation of some of its parts, better than God has himself done it, as a whole in his own book?”

Johnson, this first president and founder of the SBC, was pro-biblical and very committed to the truth claims of Scripture, but he was thoroughly anti-creedal, even anti-confessional.

While anti-confessional, William B. Johnson was ardently Christ-centered. Unity in Baptist life, he contended, came not from confessions of faith or imposed doctrinal statements. Unity came from each believer being conformed to the will of Christ. Southern Baptist fundamentalists today would berate his approach by calling it “theological minimalism.” Dismissing it with such derogatory language, however, does not abolish the fact that Johnson was Christ-centered rather than creed-centered. Hear Johnson again: ”The value of the Christocratic form of government consists in this, that each acting in reference to Christ alone, all will be conformed to Christ, and thus conformed to each other. And this is the manner by which uniformity is to be secured and preserved, and not by confederations of churches, confessions of faith, or written codes of formularies framed by man, as bonds of union for the churches of Christ.”

From 1845 to 1925, the SBC lived comfortably without any doctrinal statement.

Stage Two: Southern Baptist fundamentalists issue calls for strict and rigid orthodoxy. This happened first in the 1920s, again in the 1960s, and again beginning in 1979 and lasting to the present.

Stage Three: Fundamentalists, contrary to the SBC heritage, issue a call for a doctrinal statement to guard the orthodoxy. Prominent Southern Baptists resisted this call, thinking it unwise, but SBC leadership, in an effort to pacify fundamentalists, acquiesced to the adoption of A Statement of the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925 (BFM25). However, the SBC carefully designated the BFM as descriptive and not prescriptive. Southern Baptists of the 1920s did not force compliance with the BFM25.

W. W. Barnes, professor of church history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for forty years (1913–1953), warned Southern Baptists in 1934 of the consequences of adopting the BFM25. Calling the statement a “creed,” Barnes said: “The doctrinal effort did result in the adoption, by the Convention, of what amounts to a creedal statement—the first time the Southern Baptist Convention ever considered doing such a thing. Strange to say, the controversy that raged in the convention was not over the question whether the convention was, or ought to be, a creed-making body, but the question was: What should be included in the creed to be adopted? The reception that that creed has received, or perhaps one should say, has not received, seems to suggest that Southern Baptists are not yet ready for doctrinal centralization, but the first step has been taken. It may be another century, but if and when the doctrinal question again arises, succeeding generations can point to 1925 and say that the Southern Baptist Convention, having once adopted a creed, can do so again. Perhaps by that time other centralizing forces will have been developed and the convention may have the means and the method of compelling congregations to take notice of the creed then adopted.” Barnes’s timing was off! It did not take another century, only seventy-five years.

Stage Four: Fundamentalists spearhead revisions to the creed to guarantee the orthodoxy. The SBC revised the BFM in 1963 (BFM63), 1998 (BFM98), and 2000 (BFM2000).

Stage Five: Fundamentalists call for the imposition of the revised creed on individual Baptists to make binding the orthodoxy. Here is where this book comes in. It is a ringing Baptist protest of the changed nature and the imposition of BFM2000 upon Baptist individuals, especially missionaries.6

Stage Six: Fundamentalists camouflage their creedalism with rhetoric regarding the SBC’s historic anti-creedal posture. In other words, they denounce with history what they practice in the present.

My hope is that this book will be read and discussed by Baptists of all theological stripes. I especially hope that young people in our Baptist churches, often gripped by a pack mentality, may have the chance to study and benefit from what these faithful Baptists have written. The professor in me will not permit me to close without giving additional bibliography. If you are intrigued by what you read here, let me encourage you to secure a copy of W. W. Barnes’s 1934 book, The Southern Baptist Convention: A Study in the Development of Ecclesiology. Only eighty pages long, it is a masterful, in some ways a tragic, piece of prophecy of what has happened to the SBC. Barnes’s book can be read easily and quickly. If, however, you are ready to put your intellectual and spiritual boots on for some rigorous work, read carefully Against Returning to Egypt: Exposing and Resisting Credalism in the Southern Baptist Convention by Jeff Pool.