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Perhaps a better title for this chapter would be, "Why I Am Still A Baptist." Writing on "Why I Am a Baptist" might lead some to presume that I came to Baptistland from neutral ground. Anyone who imagines such a scenario may envision me in a pristine post-conversion condition at which point I evaluated the various doctrinal and ecclesiological positions from an objective ivory tower, unencumbered by any traditions, experiences, or prejudices from my past. Then, disinterested and totally unbiased, I chose to reside in the Baptist realm of Christ's kingdom because my exhaustive research identified the Baptist position as the one most faithful to Scripture.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. I didn't become a Baptist this way, and I find it hard to believe that anyone would follow such a path before settling on their church or denominational home.
The reality is that I was born into a Baptist home where I was taken to a Southern Baptist church at least Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night beginning nine months before I was born. My dad was a Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher prior to becoming a father. My mother taught children in Sunday School and VBS, read parts in Training Union, and attended the WMU years before I entered the world and was put on the Cradle Roll. I suppose I considered myself a Baptist even before I even called myself a Christian.
I was nine years old when, by the grace of God, I was brought under conviction of my sin and need for Christ by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of God's Word. After repenting and trusting in the person and work of Jesus Christ to make me right with God, I was immersed as a public profession of my faith in Christ. All this happened in Calvary Baptist Church of Osceola, Arkansas where I was received into membership after my baptism. That's how I came to be a Baptist.
GROWTH AS A BAPTIST
That small-town Baptist church of a hundred or so attendees was my church home throughout my childhood and adolescence. Not infrequently I was the only young person present on a Wednesday night (especially on business meeting nights) or for a Sunday night Training Union class. But by the time I went to college and could go to any church I wanted, I was a Baptist by choice. During my first week on campus I began attending both the Baptist Student Union and the largest Southern Baptist church in town.
Thus I remained in the bosom of Baptist life throughout college. However, I was also involved with the campus Fellowship of Christian Athletes at least as much as with the BSU. FCA brought me into frequent fellowship with other evangelicals on campus and was the means of occasionally introducing me to non-Baptist churches. By this means my first-hand awareness of the non-Baptist Christian world began to be expanded.
After graduation I attended law school at the University of Arkansas and immediately joined a large SBC church near campus. During this year I sensed God's call to preach, a call that was confirmed by that Baptist church when it licensed me to the Gospel Ministry. The next fall I enrolled in Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, choosing it because of the influence of several alumni whom I respected. I never considered attending any other Southern Baptist seminary, much less a seminary that wasn't a Baptist one. There I heard not only a Baptist perspective on theology and the church, but heard it contrasted with non-Baptist views. Moreover, from Tom Nettles and Leon McBeth, I learned church history—and particularly Baptist history—for the first time. I left Southwestern more of a Baptist than ever.
As I entered the pastorate, the preaching and teaching responsibilities caused me to investigate firsthand the Baptist doctrines and distinctives I had always believed. Then in February, 1981 I was preaching through John in the morning and Ephesians in the evening. I came to Ephesians 1:4, "just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, . . ." and I was forced to come to grips with the doctrine of election. The more I studied the Scriptures, the more a knot in my stomach tightened. Everything I found seemed to contradict what little I'd been taught on the subject. My seminary professors had differed on the doctrine, but I found it so perplexing and inflammatory that I'd deliberately avoided thinking about it while in school. But I no longer had the luxury of taking no position. Previously I had believed that election was either true or false; now I knew that was a false dichotomy. My studies revealed that every Bible teacher believed in election, it's just that they differed in their beliefs. I had imagined that "election" was a theologian's term, but suddenly I realized that it was one of God's words. Words like "election" and "chose" are words God put in the Bible, and they mean something.
Oddly, I remember that twenty-nine was the number of sources in my library that I investigated on the subject, including commentaries, dictionaries, and books on theology. Most of these were not from Baptists, however. What finally gripped me hardest was a section in Abstract of Systematic Theology by James P. Boyce, the founding president and theology professor of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
It was on this weekday in February that I think I understood grace for the first time; or at least my understanding of it made a quantum leap upward. Though I would never have put it so crassly, I think my belief was, "Yes, God saved me by grace, but at least I had enough sense to know what to do when I heard the Gospel." On this day I realized that I contributed nothing to my salvation but my sin. God chose to save me without any obligation to do so, and without any worthiness on my part. Election meant that God selected me for His family, and did so while passing over others who were no more unworthy of salvation than I. Even the repentance and faith that I expressed that night as a nine-year-old were gifts of grace. I put my head on my desk and sobbed for a long time.
Shortly afterward the Baptist pastor who had given me the Boyce book supplied me with others that began teaching me theology consistent with Boyce's perspective. While the Baptist pot into which I'd been stirred all my life had been overwhelmingly flavored with Pelagian, Arminian, Keswick, atheological, and various other religious seasonings, I became increasingly aware of how much of the original stock had been Calvinistic. More specifically, fellow Southern Baptist ministers pointed out to me how the SBC was organized and expanded almost unanimously by men with a robust, God-centered theology like Boyce, as well as John Broadus and Basil Manly (from whom the familiar "Broadman" name was developed).
All this is to say that through these means my Baptist roots had been deepened like a three-hundred-year-old Live Oak.
SHOULD I REMAIN A BAPTIST?
Despite all this, shortly afterwards questions begin to arise about my commitments to Baptist beliefs and ways. One reason was that within two years of my seminary graduation I found myself pastoring in a suburb of Chicago in what Southern Baptists call "pioneer missions" territory (due to the small percentage of Southern Baptists in the area). When I arrived, there were 650,000 people in DuPage County, 300,000 of which identified themselves as Catholic and 250,000 as Lutheran. For the first time in my life I was living in a place where Southern Baptists weren't the dominant denomination. In addition, there were Baptist groups there I never knew existed, such as the nearest Baptist church to ours, which was in the North American Baptist denomination. Beyond that, however, living in a community adjacent to Wheaton, I found myself surrounded by evangelical churches and organizations of all types. Within ten miles of our church were the headquarters of more than fifty evangelical ministries such as TEAM, Christianity Today, Tyndale, Greater Europe Mission, InterVarsity Press, and Slavic Gospel Association, not to mention Wheaton College. Ecclesiologically I couldn't have been in a more diverse place in all America.
Never had I heard more from a non-Baptist position. Never had I been so challenged by church members and visitors about my Baptist beliefs. On the one hand, this caused me to grow stronger as I had to think through reasons for my beliefs and practices. I discovered that many of my theological positions and church customs were at that point little more than previously unchallenged assumptions. "Show me from the New Testament," a new convert from Catholicism once asked sincerely in regard to church membership, "that I'm to officially join anything." I blinked, having never before been asked about the validity of formally placing one's name on a church roll. Eventually I did show him the New Testament basis for church membership, but his question demonstrates how some of the most basic tenets of my Baptist perspective were unexpectedly and frequently challenged.
In addition to moving out of the Baptist South, the other reason I began to reconsider my Baptist heritage, despite all it was doing to deepen my Baptist roots, was my continuing maturity in theology. Most of my newfound theological and pastoral heroes were paedobaptists. Few of my Southern Baptist forebears (John L. Dagg and James P. Boyce being notable exceptions) were published, and if they were published, their works weren't widely known. Paedobaptists, including Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Congregationalists were publishing multivolume works decades before Baptists organized their first churches. And for decades thereafter, Baptists typically struggled more with being persecuted than getting published.
As a result, by the time I started reading books by and about theologically-minded ministers, the great body of this literature was predominantly paedoaptistic. The English Puritans, writing from about 1550 to 1700, were (and are) special favorites. Then there was Thomas Boston, Matthew Henry, Jonathan Edwards, and many others up through a twentieth-century hero, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. There were the significant exceptions of John Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon, and Arthur Pink, but my library of ministerial mentors became increasingly sprinkled with paedobaptists. After awhile it became easy to think, "Most of those whose books and lives I love to read are not Baptists. They were right on so many crucial issues about God and the Gospel, so maybe they are right on the issues where they differ from Baptists. And if they are, how can I remain a Baptist?"
The only other religious bodies I remotely considered were conservative, confessionally-oriented Presbyterians. Their overall appeal, and one that I've seen become irresistible for many former Baptists, was what I've come to call a "Presbyterian ethos." The cherishing of a theological heritage, the concern for defining and defending the truth, the serious-mindedness about the things of God, the love of learning, the blending of head and heart in ministry, and a cultural sophistication that characterizes so many of these brothers was powerfully attractive to me.
Such attractions were first getting my attention about the time I was pastoring in Arkansas and was asked to preach the doctrinal sermon at the annual associational meeting. As one pastor realized I was reading from the New American Standard Bible he loudly slammed his KJV shut and shouted, "I ain't gonna listen to this sermon!", and walked out. Imagine a young minister looking over the denominational fence after an experience like that. It was humiliating to hear Presbyterians described as "Baptists who can read," and to remain a Baptist. I hungered for theological fellowship among fellow ministers, and instead found that more were interested in methods or activities than doctrine and preaching.
So I observed not only many things in certain forms of Presbyterianism that drew me, but I began to see more and more in Baptist life that repelled me. While attending associational, state convention, or national convention meetings I would see and hear things that sometimes tempted me to think, "These are not my people."
One repellant was all the fighting in the SBC. Very few, I trust, were actually enjoying it, and many—even among my fellow conservatives who were invariably on the "winning" side—were weary of the battles and their aftermath. But as I looked at the denominational landscape, ecclesiological conflict was flaring up everywhere. So to leave Baptist life for another denomination would merely be exchanging one war for another. Besides, there's a time to "contend earnestly for the faith" (Jude 3).
I was also sickened by the atheological bent common among Baptists. Church growth pragmatism was everywhere. While pastoring in Chicagoland I was on the steering committee of a ministerial fraternal that monthly hosted some of the best-known theologians, Bible teachers, and preachers in evangelicalism—at no charge. And yet, despite frequent appeals by various methods to dozens of my Southern Baptist brothers over the years, rarely did more than one of them attend any meeting. But as David Wells made plain in No Place for Truth: Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? , this was not a problem unique to Southern Baptists. Pragmatism was creeping into even the most confessionally rigorous groups. Confessional standards, as useful as they are, will not by themselves stop erosion.
So while the grass sometimes looked greener across the denominational fence, the longer I looked across it, the more I saw just about the same weed problems on the other side as on mine.
STILL A BAPTIST
The study and conversations I have had throughout the years have given me many more positive reasons to remain a Baptist than just the negative one of, "If I become something other than a Baptist, I'll find most of the same troubles there too, so I might as well remain Baptist." I wanted, and do have, better reasons than that for remaining Baptist. Unsurprisingly, many of my Baptist colleagues had experienced some of the same struggles as I. A pastor friend with a Ph.D. in New Testament from Southwestern made the full transition to the Presbyterian ministry and then returned to us. His insights, and the observations of others who left the ranks of paedobaptists were enormously enlightening.
As I kept reading the books and lives of my spiritual heroes, the minority of them who did have Baptist convictions were often powerful and persuasive. Chief among them was C.H. Spurgeon, who was immersed after his conversion despite being raised in the home of a paedobaptist minister. While ecumenical in spirit, Spurgeon was unapologetically Baptist in an ecclesiastical culture that was overwhelmingly paedobaptist. And since he is widely recognized as perhaps the greatest preacher since New Testament times, reading Spurgeon always makes me glad to say, "I am a Baptist."
However, more than anything else, the concentrated theological exchange with brothers who were in the process of becoming paedobaptists has most convinced me of the Baptist position. In the last five years of the twentieth century I was a participant in or observer of a handful of these dialogues, including one with minister who had a Ph.D. and another with a pastor who was also founder of a college. Their challenges forced me to look at texts and to think theologically in ways I'd not previously considered. But even as we parted ways and they had their children sprinkled, I was more certain than ever that the historic Baptist interpretation of Scripture was correct.
When one considers the significance of baptism and considers the gut-wrenching importance to Christian parents of the spiritual condition of their children, it is inconceivable to me how someone can believe that the New Testament would not explicitly speak (which paedobaptists admit) of infant baptism. I cannot imagine, believing as I do in the perspicuity and sufficiency of Scripture, that a new believer who had no previous church background and knew nothing of the debates about baptism, would read the Bible and conclude that infants should be sprinkled.
Furthermore, I am totally unpersuaded by paedobaptist arguments for the inclusion of unconverted people (namely sprinkled infants) into the membership of the church. Unlike the Old Covenant, I see no room in the New Covenant for any but those who know the Lord. "For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord" in Hebrews 8:10-11, where He says this about "all" those who will be in that New Covenant:
I will put My laws into their minds,
And I will write them on their hearts.
And I will be their God,
And they shall be My people.
And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen,
And everyone his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,'
For all will know Me,
From the least to the greatest of them.
There is a truckload more to the debate over the immersion of believers versus the sprinkling of infants, but that is beyond the scope of this chapter and has been dealt with elsewhere. Let me add one other word on it here and note my concern about it among Baptists. One result of admitting the unregenerate to the church rolls is that over time the practice tends to dilute the message and liberalize the witness of the church. This is of the greatest dangers to Baptists today. In our well-motivated zeal to evangelize, we have too often compromised, in practice, our zeal for a regenerate church membership. The annual statistics reported by the Southern Baptist Convention indicate that two-thirds of SBC church members are not in church on a given Lord's Day. In light of 1 John 3:14 ("We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren"), we have a Biblical basis for questioning the spiritual condition of the majority of our members. While there will always be "tares among the wheat" since God alone can see into the heart, surely we need to do a better job of discerning whether those who desire baptism and church membership have truly been born again from above. If we do not, we may soon find that the pool from which leaders and teachers are chosen is filled with unbelievers. Maybe this is why so many churches have such ungodly conflicts and why hundreds of SBC ministers are forcibly terminated each month. We want as much healthy growth as God will give our churches, but not cancerous growth.
Space does not permit me to comment on how other historic Baptist distinctives have become more precious than ever through the years. But I would affirm those which were noted as foundational Baptist doctrines William Cathcart's monumental Baptist Encyclopedia:
The Baptists of this country hold that the Word of God is the only authority in religion, that its teachings are to be sacredly observed, and that to religious doctrines and observances there can be no additions except from it; they hold that a man should repent and be saved through faith in the meritorious Redeemer before he is baptized; that immersion alone is Scripture baptism; that only by it can the candidate represent his death to the world, burial with Christ, and resurrection to newness of life; that baptism is a prerequisite to the Lord's Supper; they hold the doctrines of the Trinity, of eternal and personal election, total depravity, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ, progressive sanctification, final perseverance a special providence, immediate and eternal glory for the righteous after death, and instant and unending misery for the ungodly. They hold the doctrinal articles of the Presbyterian Church, and they only differ from that honored Calvinistical community in the mode and subjects of baptism, and in their congregational church government. They hold that all regenerated believers are saved, whether they are immersed or sprinkled, or lack both ceremonies; and they insist on the immersion of believers because Christ was immersed, and because he enjoins immersion upon all believers.1
To these I would add the doctrines of religious liberty, the separation of church and state, the priesthood of all believers, the autonomy of the local church, the discipline of the local church, and the priority of missions and evangelism.
I also want to add a word about Baptist spirituality. From my earliest Sunday School days I remember my teachers always expecting the class to read the Bible daily. Stewardship of money was emphasized even to the children. Scripture memorization, worship, service, and evangelism were too. While some of the personal spiritual disciplines found in the Bible are acknowledged too little in Baptist life (and in evangelicalism as a whole) today, the most important ones—intake of God's Word and prayer—are given the high priority they deserve. A good balance with the corporate spiritual disciplines is common among us as well. And as I've matured I've discovered a healthy, proportional spirituality characterizing Baptists throughout their history. Baptists don't have to turn to Catholic spirituality, as a growing number presently seem to find necessary, to learn Christlikeness. The true Gospel, combined with true theology and ecclesiology, produces the best disciples.
Many other groups unite with us on nearly all the above doctrines and practices. But in my heart and mind I am convinced that overall the best fruit of the Reformation and of evangelicalism is found upon the Baptist branch of Christ's vine.
BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER
Having said that, I want to confess with all genuine Christians, regardless of label, that the blood of Jesus is thicker than the water of baptism. Baptists are one with all true believers in Christ. We amen the words of the Psalmist, "I am a companion of all those who fear You" (Psalm 119:63).
In harmony with that, I adopt these words from R.M. Dudley's chapter in a Broadman Press classic from 1900, Baptist Why and Why Not as my own Baptist resolve:
If I am a Baptist and I am proud of it, I want that it shall affect me not in the way of making me narrow and bigoted and intolerant, but humble, patient, and loving toward those who differ from me, and hearty, generous, energetic, and persevering in the use of my time, talents, and means for the furtherance of the good cause. Let us show our devotion to our principles, not by boastfulness and arrogance, but by a watchful attention to the needs of the cause we love. Thus shall we best show to men our fidelity and zeal; and thus best help the truth in its onward march to complete and final victory.2
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1William Cathcart, ed., The Baptist Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881; reprint ed., Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 1988), p. 76.]
2R.M. Dudley, "The Distinctive Baptist Way: Our Reasons for the Separate Existence of Baptists," in J.M. Frost; Timothy and Denise George, eds., Baptist Why and Why Not (Nashville: Broadman, 1900; reprint ed., Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996), page 31.
Don Whitney
www.BiblicalSpirituality.org
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