If you have recently longed for the ugliness of earlier epochs in Baptist blogging, take courage. The newest post-Olympic sport seems to be Synchronized Slander. Within the past few hours, both Wade Burleson and Les Puryear have published attacks upon people who champion the biblical principles of Baptist Identity, each directed not at what we say, but at what they say that they are sure that we must mean by what we say (great mind-readers that they are).
But apart from this post, I'll not be taking the bait. I've found in the recent hiatus that I have plenty to enjoy in blogging without a brouhaha. I enjoy fellowship with my friends over at SBC Today, the production of "SBC Perspective" with them for that site, blogging on items that interest me, and pursuing the Lord's work in my church and the SBC. I have interacted with some bloggers in the past as I have believed that their movement posed some danger to the Lord's work in the SBC. I no longer see much of a movement, and I no longer can justify such an intense investment of the fleeting days that the Lord has allotted to me.
If there has been any contest between me and Wade or Les, I declare that the bell has rung on the final round, so far as I am concerned. At times I wrongly went out of my way to make personal what was theological. Theology is personal if it is real, but the harshest of my writing spoke more to my lingering and dogged immaturities as a believer than to the many weaknesses in my erstwhile opponents' positions.
In the future, I will be just as immature, I do fear, but I plan at least to make it less obvious to the world. And in doing so, I hope that the many weaknesses in these other positions will become the focus of attention rather than the heat that our discourse has sometimes generated.
