Conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention are nudging it away from its leftward drift. This has never before happened in a mainline denomination without a schism.

It is a given, in American church history, that Protestant churches drift to the theological left. Mainline Protestant intellectuals, infused with European theories of Bible criticism, retain little of what their ancestors held about the Bible’s authority.

The largest American Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, hasn’t escaped the trend, although compared with other denominations, the drift has been barely perceptible. Within the convention, however, the change has never passed unnoticed. Southern Baptists have feuded over the issue throughout much of this century.

Since 1979, the fuss has been furious. At that time, conservatives in the denomination began organizing to prevent further slippage, and since then they have been outmaneuvering the “moderates” (as the more liberal Southern Baptists have become known) at every turn. Today, it appears the conservatives have not only stopped the leftward trend, but they are turning the huge denomination back toward its historic roots.

It is not a lurch, nor even a swerve, Jimmy Draper, the president of the convention, likens it more to a deliberate course correction of a ponderous aircraft carrier. Even so, the new course is unmistakable. And it is historic, for never before in American church life has a major denomination turned back toward theological conservatism without a schism.

The word “largest” seems hardly apt to describe the Southern Baptist Convention. It has 14 million members, half again as many as the next largest church, the United Methodist. It has 36,000 congregations, 6,630 career home and foreign missionaries, and it baptized nearly a half-million people last year. It has six seminaries, 52 colleges and universities, and an agency with the modest little title of Sunday School Board. The board is the publishing arm of the convention. It owns the Broadman Press (118 titles published last year), the Holman Bible publishing company, and a chain of 65 Baptist bookstores. Its headquarters is housed in five buildings covering two-and-a-half blocks in downtown Nashville, and it has 1,500 employees. The board publishes 150 periodicals (1982 postage budget: $2.6 million), and has its own zip code. The Southern Baptist annuity board has assets of $1 billion; the Baptist Radio and TV Commission has 200 cable television systems and a goal of network of 100 low-power television stations. All Southern Baptist churches are independent. Its agency operations are financed by voluntary contributions that are made to the denomination-wide Cooperative Program. Last year Southern Baptists contributed to that program, and to special mission offerings as well, nearly a half-billion dollars.

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With all this, Southern Baptists are an intriguing diversity. Mark Hatfield, Jesse Helms, Jimmy Carter, Lester Maddox, the news editor of People magazine, and the head of a major division of the Ku Klux Klan all claim affiliation.

Most Southern Baptists were sheltered from the fundamentalist-modernist wars of northern Protestants in the 1920s. Southern Baptists remained virtually locked in the segregated, provincial South until the 1940s, when they began expanding north and west, to the discomfiture of the less-evangelistic Northern Baptist Convention (now American Baptist Churches), from which the Southern Baptists split in 1845 over the issue of slavery. Forty percent of Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) members live west of the Mississippi, with rapid growth in the Midwest and New England. Next year the convention is expected to add Canada to its territory.

Today, there are about 275,000 blacks and 635 predominantly black churches in the SBC. First Baptist in Atlanta has 150 black members and several black Sunday school teachers, where as less than 20 years ago civil-rights workers were scuffling with white deacons on the steps over whether to permit black entry. There are also a quarter-million SBC ethnics speaking 70 languages, in 3,500 predominantly ethnic churches.

With all its growth and geographical diversity, the convention has not been without theological dissension. In 1961 an uproar came at the San Francisco convention (the term convention describes both the denomination and its yearly meeting, held at changing locations, that was destined to have far-reaching consequences.

The protest was over Midwestern Seminary professor Ralph Elliott’s commentary on Genesis, published by the Sunday School Board’s Broadman Press, in which he forthrightly said Genesis 1–11 was not factual history and that Abraham only “thought he heard” a call from God to sacrifice Isaac. Broad-man promptly withdrew the book. The seminary fired Elliott, not for heresy, but for insubordination in republishing the book against the command of trustees. In response, several state Baptist editors blasted the trustees for dodging the real issue: Said C. R. Daley, editor of Kentucky’s Western Recorder: “If [Elliott] is a heretic, then he is one of many.… Professors in all our seminaries know that Elliott is in the same stream of thinking with most of them, and is more in the center of the stream than some of them.”

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In attempting to clarify its position on biblical inspiration, the SBC in 1963 adopted a revised confession of faith, declaring that the Bible “has … truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter.” If anything, the new confession only muddied the waters. Did the statement apply to the very words of the biblical autographs, or only the doctrine contained in those words? Year after year “inerrantists” tried to get the convention on record as prescribing their view of inspiration. They finally succeeded in passing their resolution in 1979, but its interpretation was not recorded in the minutes. More important, the convention elected as president a conservative, Adrian Rogers, pastor of a huge church in Memphis. He was the first of three successive conservative presidents who began to shift the denominational apparatus back toward conservatism.

At the same time, another pivotal figure entered the scene. He was Paul Pressler, a deacon and Sunday school teacher in Houston’s Second Baptist Church and a Texas Appeals Court judge. Pressler, 53, recalls: “Five young people from my Bible class went to Baylor University [an SBC school]. They called to-say they were hopelessly confused by their religion course. I drove down and read the text, which their professor had coauthered. I saw five whom I had labored over being destroyed by teachers supported with my money. On the way back to Houston, I decided to do something.

A fellow deacon told Pressler he should meet a red-haired graduate student at New Orleans Seminary named Paige Patterson “who thinks like you do.” Pressler and his wife Nancy drove to New Orleans for a Bible conference. “One night, about 10:30, we knocked on the Patterson’s door,” Pressler remembers. “We went downtown for coffee and donuts at the Cafe DuMonde. I guess you could say it was there that the Pressler-Patterson coalition was born. We talked about what could be done to turn Southern Baptists back to belief in an inerrant Bible.”

Patterson, son of a long-time Texas Baptist leader, subsequently became president of the independent Criswell Institute for Biblical Studies in Dallas, and associate pastor of the huge First Baptist Church in Dallas. He began publishing and reporting examples of “liberalism” by SBC teachers and editors. About that same time, inerrantist theologian Harold Lindsell published his book The Bible in the Balance, devoting a long chapter to “The Southern Baptist Convention: Moving Toward a Crisis.” Lindsell documented quotations from professors books and journal articles that he said proved their departure from historic SBC beliefs. He also showed results of a thesis, based on a survey by a Southern Baptist Seminary student, that indicated a decline in orthodoxy as students progressed through their studies. Lindsell said the future of Southern Baptists would depend on how they resolved the question of biblical inerrancy. Lindsell was assailed by many SBC establishment figures. The Baptist Sunday School Board refused to stock his book for their stores.

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The politically astute Pressler saw that the SBC president was empowered to name the convention’s Committee on Committees, which nominated the Committee on Boards, which nominated the trustees who hired administrators and made policy for the denomination’s schools and agencies. Each year a percentage of trustees rotated, so it would take election of several successive presidents with conservative resolve to turn the tide. That has been the core of the successful strategy.

Pressler and a corps of people began working the grassroots, showing churches evidence of alleged liberalism among denominational teachers and editors, and urging them to send their maximum allowable number of messengers to the next annual meeting and help elect a conservative president. Adrian Rogers, elected in 1979, was followed in 1980 by another conservative, Bailey Smith of Del City. Oklahoma, before “moderate” opponents realized what was happening. Smith was reelected in 1981.

In September of 1980, Pressler told a group in Virginia: “Conservatives have been fighting battles without knowing what the war was about. The lifeblood of institutions are trustees. We need to go for the jugular and get to the root of the problem. “Editors of Southern Baptist newspapers picked up the phrase “going for the jugular” and some of them portrayed Pressler as a kind of evil genius. Cecil Sherman, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized for the first time the clear danger of a takeover by inerrantists. Sherman, his brother Bill, who is a pastor in Nashville with many Sunday School Board employees in his church, as well as Kenneth Chafin, a Houston pastor, rallied fellow “moderates” to a meeting in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They organized a plan to counter what they called a “politcally motivated” attempt to take over the SBC.

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The moderates called themselves “denominational loyalists,” and they vociferously denied there were liberals in SBC schools. Chafin called the inerrantist crusade “a naked, ruthless reach for personal power that acts in ways that say any means are justified.” One of the seminary presidents said privately, however: “Why don’t we just admit that Pressler and Patterson have out-organized us?”

Despite all the rhetoric, the moderates provided a lot of ammunition for the conservatives. Cecil Sherman, then president of the North Carolina Baptist Convention, debated Patterson at a pastor’s conference in Morganton, North Carolina. Sherman declared plainly that the Bible had “errors and contradictions,” adding, “I am concerned about the message of the Bible, not the inerrancy.” He saw contradictory pictures of God in the Scriptures. “In parts of the Old Testament we have a tribal God, vindictive and cruel, low and mean, while the picture of God in Jesus is lofty and beautiful.” He suggested that the character of God remains the same, “but our perception of his character is changing.” Sherman said he held to the dynamic view of inspiration, “which was held by my seminary professors.”

Conservatives backed Jimmy Draper to succeed Bailey Smith in 1982. Draper, pastor in a Dallas suburb and formerly the associate to the inerrantists’ most revered father figure, W.A. Criswell of First Baptist in Dallas, was opposed by Duke McCall, who had just retired from the presidency of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, the school to which many charges of liberalism were directed. Draper won 60 percent of the vote. Later that year one of Southern’s professors, Dale Moody, became the target of criticism for his public denial of the doctrine of eternal security of the believer. Inerrantists capitalized, branded him an apostate, and he was eased out of his position. Draper proved to be more cautious, discreet, and open to dialogue than Bailey Smith, who flayed SBC liberals in his presidential speech. Draper pledged to “get Southern Baptists talking to each other instead of about each other.” He met quickly with moderates, asking their help in finding “common ground.” The moderates thought Draper might be accommodating until he refused to support a sharing of presidential appointive powers with leaders of state Baptist conventions, where moderates have more influence. Then he set their ears ringing by telling SBC evangelism directors in San Juan, Puerto Rico: “The extreme theological stance of the left will absolutely kill evangelism.”

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Still, Draper continued his efforts at dialogue, bringing moderate and conservative leaders along with agency heads to a summit meeting near Dallas. There, moderate Don Harbuck from Arkansas charged that “the judgmental spirit and exclusivistic posture of fundamentalism” was dividing Southern Baptists. Paige Patterson disagreed, and said agency leaders were not responsive to the SBC majority who held to an inerrant Bible. Baptist agencies, he said, should give conservatives parity with moderates in employment opportunities. Denominational employees who preferred not to use the term inerrancy should state “publicly, clearly, and unambiguously what they do believe” about essential doctrines. Students holding the Bible to be without error should not be ridiculed in seminary classrooms. The Cooperative Program should be “restructured” to permit selective giving by churches wishing to exclude agencies whose programs they could not in “good conscience” approve.

The agency heads listened and made no pledges to either side. Afterwards, Chafin said he was throwing in the towel, because until agencies are willing to fight, there is “absolutely nothing I or anyone can do to help them.”

Pittsburgh, where the 1983 convention was held in June, was supposed to be a good location for moderates, who are strong in Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. But before the convention, moderate leaders painted a gloomy picture of their prospects. In a circular letter, Harbuck said Draper had “been a more skillful and less embarrassing president than Bailey and Adrian.” Harbuck foresaw “no opposition” to Draper’s reelection. Sherman, writing to agency heads and denominational editors at the request of the moderates’ steering committee, said, “Mr. Pressler has been more successful than I ever dreamed he would be.” He added sadly: “Systematically, almost surgically, the kind of Southern Baptist I am has been excised from policy-making posts. This is painful to us since all the while we thought we were friends of the denomination. We have viewed ourselves as your defenders and supporters both in word and in coin. A denomination that has no place for us is emerging.”

Moderates lost more ground at Pittsburgh. They were unable to defeat any conservative trustee nominations, as they had at the two previous conventions.

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Draper, reelected without opposition, saw a relaxing of tensions by both moderates and conservatives. He noted that he had purposefully not used the term inerrancy in his presidential address on “Deep Beliefs” of Southern Baptists. But he added, “We still have to work through what we mean by the authority of the Bible, do some defining.” He called charges that conservatives were trying to turn the SBC into a creedal body “a straw man. The first Baptist association that met in America hadn’t met over once or twice until they adopted a confession of faith. We do have statements of belief.”

The SBC, says Draper, is “kind of cumbersome, like trying to take a sharp right turn in an aircraft carrier. You can’t do that very easily. I see [what we have done] as a midcourse correction, with our leadership being responsive to the constituency. A turning back to where we were.”

Paul Pressler, in an interview, listed five elements that brought success:

“We saw the handwriting on the wall and started early. We sought to work within the system instead of tearing down. We followed a definite plan that would get conservative trustees nominated and elected who would change the system. We did not make frontal attacks on the integrity of those we felt were liberals. We merely read what they had written and published and asked our constituency whether that was what they wanted taught in their schools.” Pressler cautioned that “the war has not been won. We still have a long way to go.” Cecil Sherman, now 55, said in an interview that the inerrantists had been winning because they “tagged into our greatest fears and dreams.” Dreams of “quantifying in terms of large sanctuaries and many baptisms. Fears that liberalism works against quantifying.” Such superchurch pastors as Rogers, Smith, and Draper had been elected “because they embody the dreams of so many pastors [to have large, thriving churches].” Sherman insisted he was not antigrowth, but that it was a mistake to say growth is the result of correct doctrine. “Moonies, Muslims, and Mormons are growing. There are pastors who have correct doctrine who are not in growing churches.” (It is a fact, however, that Southern Baptist churches, as all Protestant churches, tend to grow if they are conservative in doctrine, and tend not to grow if they are liberally inclined.)

Sherman maintained that he is “a biblicist, but one of my own mix; a traditionalist” holding that the SBC should “let leadership bear witness to an experience with God and leave the rest of doctrine to find its own level.” A denominational teacher, Sherman said, should not be bound to any creed of the past, but be permitted “soul liberty to follow Scripture as his highest objective source.”

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Dale Moody, Sherman insisted, had been “functioning as a Baptist” when he had been led by Scripture to believe in apostasy. A teacher who might also be led by Scripture not to believe in the Virgin Birth should not be fired. “It [the Virgin Birth] is in two Gospels, but not in two others,” he added. “Did Mark and John make a mistake by forgetting to list it? If the Virgin Birth is desperately important, [Mark and John] must have erred.”

Clearly, Southern Baptists are turning and churning. New faces are appearing on denominational platforms and in agency offices. New trustees with a more conservative bent are sitting on boards, and more of them are likely to come.

The last time such a change occurred in a major denomination was in 1973, when the Missouri Synod Lutherans staked themselves to a strong doctrine of biblical authority. But the church split. There is not likely to be a split among Southern Baptists, at least not soon, given the strong denominational loyalty and the retirement pensions vested in the annuity board.

Cecil Sherman was asked what he would do if the SBC seminaries were taken over by the “fundamantalist party,” as he calls it. “I will advise my church not to support a ‘Jerry Falwell’ seminary,” he declared. “They may not listen, but I will tell them that.” Another moderate told his pastor friends: “Let’s not kid ourselves. We could leave but our churches will stay.”

Although the convention is not likely to see schism, there is no question that it is making a historic turn to the theological right. The main question now is: How far will it turn?

JAMES C. HEFLEY

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