Southern Baptists Veto Book Recall

Southern Baptists turned a theological corner this month. In a decisive standing vote in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, their messengers rejected a motion to recall the recently completed “Broadman Bible Commentary” put out by their Sunday School Board. The twelve-volume commentary has been under fire because its authors advance certain theories of higher criticism that reject explicit scriptural statements.

Those who oppose the commentary and those who support it agree that much more has been at stake than the publication of controversial books. The outcome is expected to have an important theological impact upon the entire Southern Baptist Convention, which with nearly 12 million members is the largest Protestant denomination in North America. The commentary’s broad espousal of higher criticism is the first such official endorsement by a convention agency. Most evangelicals are particularly sensitive to the inroads of higher criticism because they regard the attitude toward Scripture as a watershed doctrine (see editorial, page 29).

The action of the convention in Philadelphia represented something of an about-face by Southern Baptists. The first volume of the commentary had to be withdrawn and rewritten on orders from the 1970 convention.

This year’s debate took hardly fifteen minutes. Gwin W. Turner, a Southern Baptist pastor from suburban Los Angeles, offered the motion to recall the entire commentary and made a five-minute speech citing instances in which the writers repudiated the biblical text. His presentation was forceful and articulate, yet restrained and diplomatic. Turner had also offered the motion against the first volume of the commentary two years ago in Denver.

A rebuttal to Turner was offered by Herschel Hobbs, former SBC president. Hobbs contended that Southern Baptists find it hard to agree on anything and that no commentary is perfect.

The chairman of the meeting, Carl E. Bates, who was finishing out a two-year term as SBC president, then recognized calls for the previous question. The house voted to cut off debate at that point. Bates ordered a standing vote, and the motion was adopted by a wide margin—perhaps as much as three to one.

There were some who felt that the affable Bates had influenced the vote by what he said several hours earlier in his presidential address. “Our churches,” he declared, “have steadfastly refused to forfeit one whit of their freedom to interpret the Holy Scriptures for themselves in exchange for any creed or creed-like statement devised thus far.”

Bates pleaded for an end to controversy. He said that “twice in the past ten years we have fought ‘the battle of Genesis’ while only a few yards away from our convention site, men were dying with nothing more stable to comfort and sustain them than a wad of grass offered by a secular world and a few leaves of humanism in their brains with which to face a cheerless world and an endless eternity.” He charged that “power structures are being developed in various areas to engage our people at every level in ‘the true church controversy’ of a hundred years ago.

“How can we justify fighting one another in order to preserve little zones of personal stability for ourselves when the vast majority of the world’s peoples have no hope of salvation, much less a philosophy of creation and inspiration?” he asked.

Bates, who was ineligible to be returned to office, was succeeded in the presidency by Owen Cooper, a businessman from Yazoo City, Mississippi. Cooper, 64, was elected on the second ballot over James E. Coggin, pastor of Travis Avenue Baptist Church, Fort Worth. Cooper told newsmen following his election that he opposed the motion to withdraw the commentary.

The commentary controversy goes back to January of 1970, when Broadman Press, the denominational publishing house that operates under the SBC Sunday School Board, came out with the first volume devoted to the itself as the true Church of Scotland.

There was something ironic about the assembly’s going on to consider an interim report on the Kirk’s multilateral conversations with five other churches in Scotland—including the Episcopalians—since the talks had broken down. “Another Bishops’ Report,” exclaimed one commissioner incredulously. “Some one is trying to wear us down!” The report, it was pointed out, was trying to sneak in bishops, now in the guise of “superintendents,” after they had been rejected twice in recent years. The composition of the Kirk’s delegates on ecumenical occasions was challenged: “Episcopalians don’t appoint as their spokesmen those who want to do away with bishops.” The episcopal corpse should not be subject to resuscitation but laid out and decently buried, opponents declared. The assembly, however, agreed to send the report to presbyteries for consideration and comment.

Commending a petition for public decency that had gained more than 200,000 signatures, the Moral Welfare Committee convenor said the “Achilles’ heel of contemporary Christian psychology” was that so many these days were reluctant to protest “lest they interfere with the liberty of the subject or appear as spoil sports.”

That Knox was not entirely forgotten could be seen when the assembly unanimously agreed to renew pressure on the post office, which had declined to issue a commemorative stamp, holding that too many deserving subjects already were in line.

The assembly reversed its opposition to Common Market entry after a spirited plea by Church and Nation Committee convenor E. George Balls (“the Kirk must not stand as an ecclesiastical tartan King Canute while the tides of history are flowing round its knees”), which carried the day comfortably even over the fiery oratory of the redoubtable Lord (George) MacLeod. The latter had no better success when his oft-reiterated plea to the Kirk to embrace pacifism received its traditional applause and traditional rejection.

In another remarkable change of policy, the assembly (albeit a much depleted one) called for the end to separate Roman Catholic schools in Scotland. These were said to be a factor in fostering social conflicts that might be eased if children were educated together (here the experience of Ulster probably was the decisive factor).

The assembly also:

• urged ministers to give a place in their sermons to the “deepening awareness of politics as an area of Christian concern.”

• took into the Kirk the English Presbyterian congregations of Jersey and Guernsey (Channel Islands German-occupied during World War II), orphaned after exercising their option not to join in their church’s union with the Congregationalists.

• saw the first appearance in its midst of a woman minister as commissioner.

• approved Westminster’s imposition of direct rule on Ulster.

• agreed that a committee consider further an Orange Lodge petition taking exception to Roman Catholic representation at the assembly and calling for closer ties with other evangelical churches.

• fixed the 1973 minimum ministerial stipend at $4,210.

Meanwhile across the road the assembly of the Free Church of Scotland (which spurns any relations with its big sister) heard its moderator, the Reverend Donald MacDonald, warn that an alliance with the WCC and the Common Market (sic) would lead Scotland into spiritual, political, and economic bondage. He criticized civic officials for permitting cars to be parked over the traditional site of John Knox’s grave. The quatercentenary, he declared, might be used as an occasion for cheap jibes at the reformer from “some of his fellow countrymen who are mentally incapable of appreciating the ideals for which he gave his life and morally insensitive to the degradation from which he lifted people and nation.”

Burundi Bloodshed

The predominantly Roman Catholic nation of Burundi in the center of Africa has once again been tom by violent ethnic conflict (see editorial, page 29). Reports indicate that since late April at least 50,000 persons and perhaps as many as 120,000 have been slain, most of them from the Hutu people, who make up about 85 per cent of the approximately 3.5 million inhabitants. The casualty toll is immense, and thousands have fled into neighboring countries. Almost all the rest of the people are the ruling Tutsi, who are very tall and frequently appear in pictures illustrating Africans dancing.

The minority Tutsi element began filtering down from the north about four centuries ago and gradually brought the Hutu (part of the great Bantu people who predominate throughout central and southern Africa) into virtual serfdom. The Germans conquered Burundi and its northern neighbor Rwanda at the beginning of this century, and reinforced the Tutsi reign.

After World War I, the Belgians were given the twin kingdoms as a trusteeship and administered them as appendages to their much larger territory of Congo (Zaire). Protestant missions—all of them evangelical—were allowed books of Genesis and Exodus. Several Southern Baptist state papers, most of which wield considerable influence, expressed strong disagreement with the views expressed therein. A group of conservatives then met to discuss what might be done, and the upshot was the motion presented by Turner that year at the Denver convention. It requested the board to withdraw the first volume from distribution and to have it rewritten so as to reflect a more conservative theological stance. The motion was adopted by a vote of 5,394 to 2,170.

The board voted to comply, and the authors, G. Henton Davies and Roy L. Honeycutt, agreed to rewrite their material. Davies, principal of Regent’s Park College in Oxford, England, was the author of the Genesis commentary, and Honeycutt, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, wrote the Exodus portion.

Last year at the convention in St. Louis, a motion was offered asking “that the Sunday School Board be advised that the vote of the 1970 convention regarding the rewriting of Volume I of the Broadman Commentary has not been followed and that the board obtain another writer and proceed with the commentary according to the vote of the 1970 convention in Denver.” The motion was approved by a vote of 2,672 to 2,298.

Last October, the board announced that Davies was being replaced, and that the Genesis section would be prepared instead by Dr. Clyde T. Francisco, who teaches Old Testament at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville. Francisco then stated publicly that his acceptance of the assignment did not imply rejection of the work by Davies.

Meanwhile, other volumes in the commentary had been coming out, and a number of theological conservatives were expressing their distress at the content. This led to Turner’s unsuccessful move at the convention in Philadelphia.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Worship And Withdrawal

At the quadrennial General Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, delegates reaffirmed participation in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) and elected seven new bishops. The 10-day meeting, held in Mobile, Alabama, centered on preaching and worship; there was little discussion of social issues. However, the black denomination did pass a resolution calling for “complete withdrawal” of all U. S. military forces from Viet Nam. The church, formed in the early 1800s, claims membership of about one million.

Tour Tragedy

Sixteen of the twenty-five persons slain by Japanese radicals in the Tel Aviv air terminal were part of a tour group of Puerto Rican Baptists and Pentecostals. They were traveling under the auspices of the Puerto Rican Evangelical Council. About twenty others were among the seventy-seven wounded in the attack. Dozens of the uninjured members of the party, led by Baptist clergyman José Abner Muñoz, later met at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem to pray for their hurt and grieving friends. A U. S. Air Force jet airlifted the bodies to the San Juan, Puerto Rico, airport, where a Methodist minister conducted a memorial service.

Kirk Assembly In Edinburgh: In Remembrance Of Knox

In bright sunshine a housewives’ group stood with a placard urging rejection of the Common Market. Behind them, Ian Paisley’s Scottish sidekick Pastor Jack Glass could be heard berating the Kirk for its inability to recognize a popish plot. Nearby was a coffin and a banner associating grave restlessness with John Knox in this quatercentenary year of his death. To Edinburgh residents it was just one more indication that up on the Mound near the castle the Church of Scotland General Assembly was in session.

This year there was no protest inside the hall when the Roman Catholic visitor was welcomed: perhaps security was better, in view of the uproar of recent years; or perhaps the convener was cunning in introducing only “the bishop of Dunkeld,” after the applause adding a postcript revealing that here was no Episcopalian—before hurrying on to one of less dubious pedigree.

Earlier, at the opening devotions, on the right of the Lord High Commissioner (representing the queen) could be seen Edinburgh’s first Labour lord provost, who as an atheist did not join in the traditional metrical psalm. On the dais beneath them was the self-styled “expiring moderator” Andrew Herron, the only incumbent in modern times whose university, inexplicably, had not bestowed on him the customary D.D.

The heat and glare of TV lights (for the assembly is still big news in Scotland) added to the normal discomfort of an ill-ventilated hall as some 1,360 ministers and elders began the eight-day sessions. Bishops soon came in for a thumping from even an irenic convenor, Professor J. K. S. Reid, who criticized Scottish Episcopalians for introducing “preconditions” into ecumenical discussions and who directed some astringent remarks toward the 50,000-member body that still tends to regard in but have converted only a small percentage of the population. In Burundi, English Anglicans, Swedish Pentecostals, Danish Baptists, and Quakers, Free Methodists, and World Gospel Mission workers from America are distributed by comity throughout the compact, densely populated country; also present are the ubiquitous Plymouth Brethren and Seventh-day Adventists. The first two groups are the largest; all but the Adventists work in fairly close cooperation, as shown in “New Life For All” campaigns and Radio Cordac.

Specific details of the recent violence are unknown, since most communications have been cut off, but the general pattern is clear: the conflict, like that in Bangladesh, is ethnically based rather than religious (as in Northern Ireland) or both ethnic and religious (as in Sudan). Hutu leadership—secular and religious, Catholic and Protestant—has been decimated.

The Hutu have been subservient for centuries and were not sufficiently organized or motivated to take control when independence from Belgium was gained in 1962. By contrast the Rwanda Hutu, who had been more harshly treated by the Tutsi there, overthrew their masters in 1959 and subsequently massacred thousands of them. Other Tutsi escaped to the south.

The Hutu want a bigger role in running their own poor but beautiful country; the Tutsi are fearful that if they lose power they will also lose their lives. The result of this combustible mix is that the slightest spark, such as a Hutu uprising in any part of the country, provokes the Tutsi to try to eliminate any potential leaders among the Hutu everywhere. A few years ago about 100 elected representatives were marched into a stadium and slain. Now, observers report that Hutu males with secondary educations, no matter how non-political, have been arrested and executed. Government officials, however, deny this.

This latest and most extensive conflict was apparently sparked by a Hutu revolt in the far south in which many of the Tutsi leaders and their families were massacred. At about the same time, the king was slain also, but reports differ on the incident. He had been ousted in 1966 in an intra-Tutsi power struggle and only recently allowed to return as a private citizen; a republic was established.

So far, no missionary casualties have been reported, and apparently no evacuations have taken place. When the bloodshed ceases, the missionaries must start over in training Hutus to teach school, preach the Word and shepherd the flock, and serve in dispensaries. They must also try to effect reconciliation between the Hutu and Tutsi in their congregations.

DONALD TINDER

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