Word of God Battle of the Bible (PK Confessions)

So--to continue with the whole inerrancy issue (i.e., the notion that the Bible is a cohesive, error-free set of divine propositional truths unblemished by any shade of contradiction or error).

As a youngster Southern Baptist, I remained ignorant of the fine distinctions between theological terms like inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration. I more or less endorsed a simple, "if the Bible says it, it's true" doctrine. I would venture to say that this is where most of the members of my father's churches lived. This is not to say they weren't committed Christians; it's just that debates about which exact doctrine of inspiration one subscribes to tends to be the stuff of professional theologians. The average church member is as likely to know about the 1978 Chicago Statement on Inerrancy as the average US citizen is likely to know how many amendments there are to the US Constitution (27) or who the current Secretary of Agriculture is (Tom Vilsack). Yes, these are important bits of information, but the average citizen can operate without knowing these. They exist on the back burner of vital civic knowledge.

Similarly, the inerrant-infallible status of the Bible in my early church training operated as a kind of sub-principle shaping other, more obvious facets of church life. I don't remember ever hearing a sermon or Sunday school lesson about inerrancy per se, but a high reverence for the Bible permeated church experience.

There were songs, such as "The B-I-B-L-E/That's the book for me." There was the Pledge of Allegiance to the Bible we recited each day during Vacation Bible School ("I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God's holy word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God"). There was the expectation that everyone attending church would own and bring to every worship service their own Bible (all the better if you had a fancy leather carrying case). Readings from the Bible structured every level of worship: sermons were based on a passage (or passages), Sunday School curricula took classes systematically through particular books of the Bible, endless contests or requirements urged children to memorize verse after verse (I can still recite tons of them), and of course stories from the Bible filled home and church life.

What I was unaware of as a youngster was the degree to which the question of Biblical inerrancy as such had moved to the forefront of the minds of many Southern Baptist leaders. Time and a lack of expertise makes this a brutally abridged account, but basically the 1970s and early 80s saw a massive shift in the ideological and theological focus of the Southern Baptist Convention--the denomination as a whole. This shift--alternately called the fundamentalist takeover or the conservative resurgence, depending on the historian's perspective--consisted of the conservative segments of the denomination establishing control over the political levers of the denomination.

For instance, by flooding the Convention's ballot boxes with local church supporters (I say flood, not stuff--they did nothing illegal), conservatives gained control of some key leadership positions. These conservative leaders in turn nominated similarly conservative sub-leaders, and so on. They thus democratically achieved a political hegemony within the denomination.

At the same time, conservatives pushed for and achieved a purge of non-conservatives (who were typically described not as "liberals" but as "moderates") from both denominational and seminary leadership. They did so through the tool of a doctrinal question: Do you affirm the Bible as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Those leaders, missionaries, seminary professors, etc. who did not affirm this position were forced out.

The seminary victory was particularly important. Pre-takeover (i.e., when my parents got their degrees), Baptist seminaries featured a range of theological and biblical-critical methods. Post-takeover, any pastor with seminary credentials (typically a Master of Divinity) would have been trained in methods of Biblical criticism hostile to the "higher criticism" of other Protestant traditions.

The inerrancy question had thus assumed a kind of definitional importance it had not had previously in Baptist culture. Now, Southern Baptists are congregational rather than connectional in structure. That is, each congregation enjoys a good deal of autonomy in terms of its operation (contrasting with connectional systems like the Roman Catholic Church or the United Methodist Church). The Convention itself could not directly enforce inerrancy orthodoxy on the local church level, and some Southern Baptist churches remained moderate-to-liberal. Ripples from the takeover were thus slow to reach me personally as a Southern Baptist.

By the mid-80s, however, my parents--both of whom were moderates--had begun to feel that their time in the Southern Baptist Church might be limited. They returned from yearly denominational meetings increasingly dispirited. My mother wrote (and saw published) a letter critical of the takeover in the national Baptist periodical. My father began considering parachurch ministries, such as hospital chaplaincy.

Coincidentally, this was also around the time that I began to have some questions about the whole inerrancy thing...