The exegetical foundation for proxy baptism of the dead is stronger than the exegetical foundation for "creation care" as presently defined.
- Both concepts rise and fall on the interpretation of a single statement. The modern environmental concept of "creation care" depends entirely upon a particular interpretation of Genesis 1:26-28. Although the Bible makes abundant mention of God's status vis-à-vis His creation—that He created it, rules over it, and retains ownership of it—this Genesis passage is the only suggestion in the Bible, indirect as it is, that man is accountable to God for the climatic health of the earth. The notion of proxy baptism of the dead depends entirely upon a particular interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:29. This verse, unlike the Genesis passage, appears in a New Testament epistle to a church. All other things being equal, drawing exegetical support from a New Testament passage is generally a stronger position than drawing exegetical support from an Old Testament passage, because the questions regarding how the concept might have been affected by the Fall or the Gospel are not in play with regard to a passage in a New Testament epistle.
- Major alternative interpretations of Genesis 1:26-28 are available, unlike 1 Corinthians 15:29. Many exegetes will hazard some sort of guess, but when you get down to brass tacks, most will concede that we have no idea what 1 Corinthians 15:29 is talking about. On the other hand, a long and distinguished history exists of reading Genesis 1:26-28 as a passage subjecting the earth to human domination, to be employed for the benefit of man.
- Other passages in the Bible seem specifically to contradict the notion that human activity changes the climate. Ecclesiastes 1 specifically mentions several climatological phenomena as items unaffected by the "vanity" of human existence, pointedly asserting the indefinite unfazed existence of the earth in the face of human endeavors. In 1 Kings 17-18, Matthew 8:23-27, and James 5:17-18, the ability to impact the weather receives specific attention as a demonstration of the power of God in contrast to the power of mere mortal activity. Apocalyptic passages in both Old and New Testaments seem to teach pretty clearly that climactic climatic cataclysm is God's ultimate intention for the earth rather than a human-induced phenomenon that contravenes His design. On the other hand, although strong exegetical evidence refutes the notion of post-mortem evangelism or conversion, no other passage of scripture anywhere even tangentially addresses the idea of proxy baptism for the dead either to support it or to refute it.
Neither case is strong exegetically. Neither case convinces me exegetically. But the exegetical basis for the idea that I ought to be baptized in behalf of my great-grandfather, weak as it is, is stronger than the exegetical evidence that I ought to be concerned about monitoring my carbon footprint.
One might even say that every time a Southern Baptist argues that pollution is unbiblical, that person has rejected the sufficiency of Scripture and has become a closet Roman Catholic. And every time that person uses religious rationales to advocate governmental imposition of restrictions upon what I can drive, burn, cultivate, manufacture, mine, or pump from the earth, that person has become a closet Pharisee, loving their own rules more than Scripture itself.
Of course, to make such a public statement would be to cast grave aspersions upon those who see things differently and to throw down the gauntlet and call for heated, public, high-stakes debate about the idea, and I do not wish to go quite so far. Rather, I believe that our greener brethren are attempting to address questions arising out of human technological advancement, and are attempting to do so within the framework of a generally biblical worldview. We might be able to come to differing conclusions about environmental matters without ratcheting the level of rhetoric up quite so high. At least that would be my hope.
This isn't 2006.
As we did in Greensboro, Southern Baptists find before them a SBC presidential election spread to the four winds. Some of the candidates are serious contenders, while others are also-rans. The chance of a second-ballot election for president is high. Dissident support is aligning behind Avery Willis, with some portion going to Les Puryear. Conservative support is falling behind Frank Cox and Johnny Hunt. I have not yet made my selection.
I have heard people draw comparisons to 2006, the last contested election, suggesting that the outcome in 2006 offers some prediction of the outcome this year—the first-ballot victory of an unexpected candidate. Certainly there are some parallels between 2006 and 2008, but I believe that there are more important differences.
Primary among them is the blog fatigue that has gradually spread across the Internet. WIthout authoring a history of the blogging dropouts of the past two years, I'll direct your attention to the difference in tone on blogs this year. In 2006 Johnny Hunt was the focus of heated blogging conversation. This year the same candidate has experienced hardly any criticism at all online. In 2006 Ronnie Floyd was vivisected by various blogs in the months leading up to the election. Has any candidate experienced anything similar this year? Not that I can tell. Apparently the worst that any candidate has endured has been my premature outing of Les Puryear's candidacy.
It isn't that the blogosphere is fawning over the presidential candidates with glowing praise. The evidence suggests rather that Southern Baptist bloggers and blog readers just aren't that interested in the presidential election. The prominent group-blog SBC Today has conducted interviews of all of the announced presidential candidates to date. The latest, of candidate Les Puryear, has generated only twenty-nine comments, only three of which mention candidate Puryear at all. An interview with candidate Avery Willis resulted in the revelation that Willis's daughter is the ordained co-pastor of a church in Kansas City, yet even that stunning bit of news generated a paltry eighteen comments. The interview with Johnny Hunt elicited nine comments. Bill Wagner was able to provoke forty-two comments by insulting SBC Calvinists. Leading the pack was the Frank Cox interview, where the pseudonymous "Bill Kiffin" took it upon himself to denigrate in his comments all of those with D.Min degrees or with degrees from Luther Rice.
Perhaps the national presidential election is sucking some of the oxygen out of SBC presidential politics. I think that the departure from blogging of some voices and the maturation of others has led to greater civility in the medium. The impending failure of some of the more extreme leftward campaigns for SBC change has alternately provoked spikes in blogging ferocity and taken the wind out of more than a few sails. Furthermore, blogging is an intense business. It wears me out. And the longer I do it, the less it takes to wear me out. I blog less frequently, and when I do blog, I blog with less intensity.
I predict that things will pick up between now and the Convention—I expect at least two major controversies between now and June 10—but any issues that arise between now and Indianapolis will serve only to push the presidential election even further into the background.
So, it isn't 2006. History is ultimately linear rather than cyclical, even if the past is sometimes a clue to the future. I am confident that the author of history's end can control it all even throughout our fits of passion and apathy. It will be interesting to see how we choose to attempt to follow Him this year.
I hear good things about Sam Schlorff's recent work entitled Missiological Models in Ministry to Muslims. I plan to obtain a copy for review and for my own edification. I also recommend the book to my readership.
It isn't exactly on Amazon, but you can find ordering information here. A review of the book in the January 2008 volume of the journal Missiology will probably pique your interest, if you have a copy handy to you. The book itself is under $20 plus S&H. I'll host a conversation after I've read it, so if you read it too, we'll all have an informed dialogue.
I have not yet decided how I will cast my presidential ballot in Indianapolis. Indeed, I'm not yet certain that the field is completely set for me to know what all of my options are. At this point, my deliberations are between voting for Dr. Frank Cox and voting for Dr. Johnny Hunt.
It would really help to be able to get to know these men better.
If you live within driving distance of Fort Worth, TX, then you are about to have that opportunity with regard to one of your voting options: Dr. Frank Cox. Birchman Baptist Church will host a reception with Dr. Cox on Thursday, May 29, 11:00 AM.
I hear a lot of great things about Dr. Cox, and I look forward to meeting him face-to-face on that day. It would be great to see you there, too. Who knows? Maybe things will wrap up just in time for me to visit Papasitos for lunch!
The Dallas Morning News is providing online a video clip of Dr. Jack Graham addressing Prestonwood Baptist Church last night. Earlier this week a member of Prestonwood's pastoral staff was arrested for online solicitation of sex with what he believed to be a thirteen-year-old girl. A moment like that will test all of your gifts as a pastor. I appreciate that Pastor Graham dealt directly with the issues, promised that the church would take responsibility for all of its obligations in the ongoing investigation, announced the immediate termination ("resignation"...yeah, right) of the offender, acknowledged the negative effect this sort of thing has upon the trust that people invest in their pastors, and pointed the congregation toward a positive future that will prevail against the gates of Hell.
Go look carefully at the video. May it never be that you have to give such an address to your church, but if you should, careful analysis of this statement would be a good bit of preparation.
I think we might all pray for the folks at Prestonwood, too.
With the launch of the Resolution on Regenerate Church Membership came also the launch of a new website entitled Association of Convictional Baptists. Some speculation has ensued regarding who this group might be, what might be the significance of the name, and what is the nature of the group's beliefs. Consider this post the answer to those questions, and perhaps to some others as well.
Who Is the Association of Convictional Baptists? At the moment, Bart Barber. That's right—I reserved the domain name, built the site, and threw open its doors solely as an individual project. I hope that it will grow beyond this weak and meager beginning, but at the moment the membership list is pretty small.
What is the raison d'être for the Association of Convictional Baptists? The front page of the site currently contains (my apologies if you come to this post in the future and find other content there) the text of the Fifth-Century Initiative, a document that I wrote last year. Many other people have looked at that document and have generally affirmed its tenets. I believe that the principles articulated there represent a needed and important course of renewal for Southern Baptists.
I gave thought (and even performed some initial work) toward the possibility of developing and hosting a conference built around the Fifth-Century Initiative, but after lengthy and agonizing soul-searching, I decided not to do so. The idea sounded great at first, but the more I pondered it, the further away from it I journeyed. What did I mean to accomplish with the conference? I could never get away from that question. Too many times, I think that conferences become something akin to youth camp for adults—a time of isolated euphoric concentration upon important things. Youth camp is important (God called me to preach at one), but what makes youth camp important is the daily grind of ministry to youth as an influence to help the lessons learned at youth camp to take root when transplanted from the greenhouse into the common soil of everyday life.
Apply that thought analogically to the Fifth-Century Initiative. My passion is for providing day-to-day help for Southern Baptist churches to seek renewal. The best format for such help, I have come to believe, lies in a community rather than a conference. So that's what I hope to build. Someday, perhaps, we will have a conference, if it seems to fulfill some genuine need. But for now, what I hope to do is to make of the site a resource center and community gathering place for people orienteering this elusive pathway toward rediscovering who Christ has called us to be.
Where'd the Name Come From? Well, it's a three-word title. I'll take them in reverse order just to make things more difficult for you!
Baptist: This is an unashamedly Baptist site, not out of pridefulness but out of a sincere belief that the renewal that we need lies within the historic tenets of Baptist belief. The historic tenets I have in mind you'll find articulated in the Fifth-Century Initiative document.
Convictional: The ACB seeks to return us all to a convictional understanding of what it means to be a Baptist.
It is a movement pitted against the concept of congenital Baptists. Parentage does not a true Baptist make. There is no such thing as a blue-blooded Baptist. The only blood that matters was shed on Calvary. The congenital Baptist theory is responsible for at least two ills at lethal work among us. First, it has filled our churches with people who attend and worship where they do solely because of generational inertia. It is possible to be dead-set determined to be a member of a Baptist church, simply because of lineage, without even knowing the theological principles that undergird that august name. Second, and related to the first, it has led to the false notion that the "heirs" of Baptist theology can define it to mean anything (or nothing) at all and that the name must follow them wherever they would wander theologically, since it has been passed down to them as a birthright.
It is a movement pitted against the concept of coincidental Baptists. This movement is not for those who attend the Baptist church in town simply because it has the largest ad in the newspaper or the coolest praise band or the most active youth program. This movement is not for those who are staying with the SBC because they're going whichever way the Annuity Board goes. This movement is not for those whose Baptist beliefs arise out of a paycheck. Those who join a Baptist church merely to see a reduction in seminary tuition costs need not apply (not that there's an application).
Rather, this site is dedicated to the concept of convictional Baptists—a people who share the sincere, educated, and heartfelt conviction that the major distinctives of Baptist belief are found in the New Testament. For me, it is not about the beliefs of my parents, about the wording on a sign in front of our worship auditorium, or the place I just happen to be at this point in my life. I believe that I must be Baptist or be disobedient to Christ. It is a matter of conviction for me.
In saying so, I know that there are a great many in the world who believe (wrongly) that they must be non-Baptist (or at least a whole lot less Baptist than I am) or be disobedient to Christ. Such folk should be thankful that I am a Baptist, for as such I am firmly committed to their freedom to pursue their own convictions. But I am also committed to my freedom to pursue Baptist convictions, including the freedom of Baptists to associate voluntarily with one another around Baptist principles for mutual encouragement and edification. I do not violate the rights of non-Baptists in my desire for the freedom of Baptist institutions to be unashamedly Baptist.
Association: As I said above, the purpose of this site is to provide resources and community for Convictional Baptists laboring within the context of local churches to heed the instruction of Christ in the ministries that He has assigned to us. A history guy like me cannot conceive of any entity existing for the strengthening and fellowship of churches without gravitating to the word Association. The historic function of Baptist Associations has been precisely to provide resources and community encouragement to strengthen churches in their convictions and ministries.
The danger of employing this word, of course, is the fact that some will conjecture that I am attempting to supplant the geographic associations that have played and do play such an important role in Southern Baptist life. Not at all. As we all ought to know, Baptist Associations should be entirely autonomous creatures. They serve as a handmaiden to the churches, not as a spouse. The relationship between church and association is not a monogamous one, for local churches affiliated with local associations are also affiliated with state conventions and the SBC.
I do think that the work that I hope ACB to be doing in the future is work that local associations ought to be doing but sometimes (too often?) are not—the work of churches strengthening one another and giving one another healthy feedback with regard to our theology. But local associations are doing things that I don't think ACB will ever do. They are planting churches, they are helping local Baptist churches to find a common voice within a certain patch of geography. They are hosting training and other conferences at a frequency that no online site could ever accomplish. They are facilitating a level of fellowship among churches that mere electrons can never replicate. It is my prayer (and indeed, one of the planks of the Fifth-Century Initiative) that local associations are here to stay and will only grow stronger in their ministries. May the day come when every local association in the SBC has embraced these biblical keys to renewal. They will be far more effective than this little website will ever be, and on that day the ACB will promptly and gladly lock the doors forever due to lack of interest.
Besides, we all know that one preacher with a computer doth not an Association make. This part of the name is proleptic.
So perhaps any mystery vanishes with this post. Some of my readers will not agree with my goals—already have disagreed with some of them in other contexts. I love you in the Lord; I just don't happen to be building this site with you specifically in mind. But to those of you who feel the tug of the Holy Spirit toward things like Regenerate Church Membership and the other principles articulated in the Fifth-Century Initiative, I pray that together we can see the Head of the Church work great things in our congregations in the coming years.
It's not every day that I quote Amy Grant favorably (please direct your hate mail to...), but one interview she gave contained a real nugget of wisdom, IMHO. Asked about criticism she had received for something she had done (I think it had to do with her crossover project that she released with Peter Cetera), Grant offered a viewpoint of criticism that struck a good balance, I thought, between the foolish refusal to listen to criticism (which can often help us to grow) on the one hand, and the foolish practice of listening to all criticism immediately (which will paralyze us, robbing us of productivity).
It was Grant's analogy that I thought was truly profound. She compared her entertainment career to the painting of a great work of art. An artist, Grant said, can't set up the easel, squeeze out the paints onto the palette, pull out a brush, paint a single stroke, and then step back and ask the world, "What do you think?" before painting stroke two and repeating the request for criticism. No, Grant observed, sometimes you just have to dive into the canvas and paint. Then, later, when the painting is done, that's the time to request and evaluate criticism of the finished project. The painting of the masterpiece rightly takes place behind closed doors, and then its exhibition and evaluation come publicly when it is finished and ready for showing.
There's a good reason for this—every painting is a mess at some point in the process. I love to watch the PBS show "The Joy of Painting" with the late Bob Ross. He was a bit quirky and odd, but I think his show is entertaining. In a mere thirty minutes (minus network time), Ross paints an oil painting from scratch. There's always a point about ten minutes into the show where I find myself staring at the screen and saying out loud to nobody in particular, "Well, he's messed up! He didn't mean to pull that paint all the way over there. That's not going to look good at all."
Of course, when the end of the show comes, the painting always looks precisely as it should. That's why Bill Clinton would make a horrible painter—you can't build masterpieces with daily opinion polling.
Recently I began to work to build support for the Resolution on Regenerate Church Membership. RCM is a principle that matters a great deal to me. Although I am not the author of the resolution's wording, I am thankful to be able to do my part in carrying it forward. Malcolm Yarnell wrote the original draft of this resolution. When he did, he approached several people and asked them to suggest revisions or indicate whether they could support the resolution. This all took place in 2007, quite some time ago. As I began my efforts to bring the resolution forward this year, my first task was to contact all of the people who had already seen and tentatively affirmed the resolution in order to learn whether they were still in support of the resolution and willing to lend their support as the process went forward.
It is a selective culling of this conversation, carefully trimmed to put forward a false impression, that Wade Burleson released in a recent post. Later, Nathan Finn published a post declaring that there are no more secrets in Southern Baptist life.
I am posting today to say that, if there are no more secrets in Southern Baptist life (presuming that the email exchange I initiated qualifies as a "secret"), then we will be much the worse for it. There's a reason why authors don't publish their first drafts. There's a reason why you pastors out there work on your sermons in the privacy of your study before you proclaim them from the pulpit. There's a reason why Christ's own commanded procedure for the most serious bit of business a church might consider—the exclusion of a member by church discipline—is a process that begins very secretively before it becomes a public spectacle down the line.
The reason for all of these things is quite simply that ideas need to mature, facts need to be checked, proposals need to be vetted, and negotiation needs to take place, in the vast majority of cases, before the whole world gets caught up into some public show about something. I'm a big proponent of congregationalism, but the very worst form of congregationalism takes place when somebody stands up in a public meeting and throws upon the floor some question that neither the congregation, the moderator, nor he himself has ever really pondered before. These moments typify the phrase "the pooling of our ignorance." No, I'll take every time the person who has given careful thought to what he wants to do, has sought the advice of others, and has brought to the congregation a thoroughly considered and well-worded motion for the body's perusal.
Secrecy in the wrong places most certainly can be a problem. Other than exceptional cases, the convention and her entities ought not to be able to act in secrecy and ought not to be able to cover up past actions. Here's a brilliant idea: We ought to arrange to have a free and open meeting where all of our decisions are made in full view of the public with all of our churches having an opportunity to participate. People ought to be free to work privately before that meeting to decide what is the best thing to propose, the best way to explain a proposal, or the best person to advocate for one thing or another. But when the hour arrives and the time comes for Southern Baptists to make their final decisions, those decisions ought to take place in an atmosphere of open discussion and free debate. Now THAT would be a system that would combine the strengths of private preparation with the strengths of open discussion and decision-making. We ought to put together a system like that.
Oh wait a minute…that's the system we ALREADY HAVE.
Or at least it is the system we ought to already have. I'm troubled by rumors I heard in this discussion that, unlike at SWBTS, at some of our entities the salaries of entity heads may be a closely guarded secret kept even from trustees. Our public decision-making process and our past actions (such as the setting of salaries) ought to be made in openness and kept freely available to Southern Baptists, while we preserve the freedom of individual Southern Baptists to seek counsel, negotiate with one another, and develop proposals in whatever level of privacy they desire and wish to attempt to have.
As a final note on this topic, allow me to say that the most curious and comical aspect of this entire latest melodrama in Southern Baptist life is the fact that the three principals involved—Tom Ascol, Malcolm Yarnell, and myself—have gotten along so swimmingly well throughout it all. Others suggest that we would have a combined resolution rather than two resolutions if everything had played out on a blog from day one. From my perspective, I say au contraire, the very best and most productive collaborations we ever had have been the ones that have taken place with the greatest level of privacy (secrecy, if you wish). The more people who have been involved, and the more melodrama injected into the process by others, the more elusive has been the challenge of coming to a single unity of thought. In my opinion, Wade and Nathan's advice is precisely the way NOT to get anything productive done in the SBC (OK, Nathan's post wasn't precisely in the way of advice).
I think that I speak for both Malcolm and Tom when I say that both of these resolutions are good resolutions, and that we three are cordially and fraternally committed to seeing something good and productive on the topic of Regenerate Church Membership passed at this year's Annual Meeting. Were there nobody else in the Southern Baptist Convention, the three of us would already have something put together. Of course, if we were the only three people in the SBC, there would be neither any need for such a resolution nor any interest from the world in what we wished to say!
So here's the deal: I have in the past and will in the future continue to work "behind the scenes" any time I have anything that I wish to accomplish in the SBC. If you ever hear me offer a resolution, you can be absolutely certain that I had someone else look at it to see whether there was anything stupid in it before I stand up in front of the Jumbotron and start trying to read it through the five-second delay. I may have had fifty people look at it. I may have had five hundred people look at it. To do otherwise is just foolish, as is the expectation that I would have to CC: the sixteen million Southern Baptists on every email I send out in order not to be secretive.
After all, we don't even know where all of those people are.
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