Baptist denominations are much different than those of other Protestant Christians. They are not connectional when it comes to any kind of church authority, since each Baptist church is independent and autonomous in its polity, doctrine and theology. Even though Baptists came to America with the English Separatists in Massachusetts in 1620, their insistence that churches be independent of both the ecclesiastical authority of other churches, as well as the political authority of the magistrates, led to their expulsion from the colony in 1638. So they followed Roger Williams to Rhode Island, establishing the town of Providence, and the first Baptist church in America, that same year.
It was not until during the Second Great Awakening that Baptists in America gave much thought to forming what could be defined as a "denomination." They organized the Triennial Convention in 1815 for the purpose of supporting the sending of missionaries. It was a loose confederation of churches in voluntary cooperation, as many Baptist churches didn't join it. As the politics of slavery rolled toward the Civil War, many of the Baptist churches in the North and Midwest became abolitionist in their perspective on slavery, and based their arguments on the Bible. The Triennial Convention determined that slaveowners were not qualified to serve as missionaries and enacting this restriction led many of the churches in the slave states to withdraw and form the Southern Baptist Convention.
A White Supremacy Supported by Uneducated, Untrained Pastors and Church Leaders
Although most Baptists were very conservative in their view of the Bible as the authoritative, written word of God, the cultural influences that were separating Americans on the issue of slavery were separating Baptists, too. The Southern Baptist Convention's established parameters for fellowship and cooperation included shared beliefs that black people were enslaved because of their inferiority as a race, something that they claimed to support with scripture.
They were in error with regard to the Bible's teachings. Baptists in the south were far from the few educational institutions in the United States that were established by Baptists for training ministers, and tended to mistrust ministers who had a theological education. And so, when it came to racism and slavery, they depended on an interpretation of the Bible that suited what they practiced, and which was controlled by and therefore also limited by the culture in which they existed.
This kind of uninformed, uneducated preaching was quite common in the United States during and after the Second Great Awakening. Without any colleges or theological schools of their own, the Southern Baptist Convention rooted itself in the doctrine of white supremacy from blatant mis-interpretations of the Bible on this issue. And in the aftermath of the Civil War, especially during Reconstruction, with the government of the Confederacy disbanded, its ideology and culture was preserved by the various state and associational groupings of churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. There were still thousands of SBC churches in the 70's that, in their bylaws and policy, did not permit blacks to be baptized or become members of the church and it would not be until the 1990's that the convention would finally approve a resolution condemning slavery and apologizing for its racist past.
With Women, the SBC is Making a Similar Mistake
It would be difficult to count the number of sermons that were preached over more than a hundred years of SBC history which took a racist cultural interpretation and codified it into church theology and doctrine. In justifying their position on racism and slavery, they used exactly the same interpretive standards, the "hermeneutical principles," if you will, of studying and interpreting the Bible, that they now claim to use in arriving at the conclusion that women can't be pastors. The literal approach to interpretation, which often ignores and doesn't take into consideration the circumstances that the individual writers were addressing, requires separating verses from their historical context and from the social conditions present when the passages were written. And so, while they have changed the way they see racism and slavery, at least they say that they have changed their view, they make the same error in interpreting the Apostle Paul's statements about women as universal for all churches for all time, when clearly, that is not what he intended them to be.
No Bible writer clearly makes the statement that "women are not qualified for the office of pastor, or the "Episkopos," the Bishop, of a local church. Those who take this perspective, called "complimentarianism," or the idea that women and men have complimentary, but not the same, roles in church order, rely on I Timothy 3, where the qualifications of this office of bishop, include the statement, "the husband of one wife." They then also correlate this list of requirements with 2:11-15, where, exercising his own authority as an apostle, Paul says "I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man, she is to keep silent."
There is one other place in the New Testament, I Corinthians 14:34 where Paul uses similar language in saying that women must be silent, not allowed to speak, and connects this prohibition with Eve's temptation in the garden of Eden. It is on a very literal application of these verses that the Southern Baptist Convention has rested its argument that women cannot be designated to serve as "pastors" in churches today, in the 21st century. Paul does not cite Jesus in support of his statement "I do not permit a woman", which indicates that he was addressing a specific issue in a specific church, or specific churches, since he doesn't mention this prohibition anywhere else, at least, not in any of his writings that made it into the scripture.
But it is very clear that he limits the extent of these statements to his own authority as an apostle. It's certainly open for debate regarding the extent of that authority in making polity for church governance and operation for all time, but I would agree with the context that places this restriction within the cultural framework of the day, for the protection of the churches. Paul wrote many other words instructing churches that he makes clear are standard doctrine corroborated with the words of Christ himself. Jesus' words and actions regarding women would suggest that what Paul wrote to Timothy and to the church at Corinth is for those places and seasons of time. His other words about women, as well as those of the other apostles, would indicate this to be the case.
There are multiple arguments against this position that require no departure from the Baptist doctrine of Biblical authority, which includes recognition of the scripture as "truth without any mixture of error for its matter." There are volumes of books written which do not draw this conclusion and which take the same high view of scripture as Southern Baptists claim. I would recommend going to the Christians for Biblical Equality website for resources and information and for the whole scope of doctrinal support for women serving in any capacity in the church to which they feel called and gifted, including as a pastor of any kind.
Southern Baptists got out of the rut of Biblical support for white supremacy and slavery by coming to the conclusion that, while the New Testament was written in a time when slavery was a way of life, the Bible's writers recognized its existence, but did not approve it or endorse it as a way of life, and in fact, in their own way, actually opposed it. The scriptures in the New Testament in particular that were once used to justify slavery are part of the cultural fabric of the day in which they were written, according to current doctrine. The fact that there are Biblical instructions for the manner in which slaves should address their masters isn't an endorsement of the practice.
Likewise, women were seen as being inferior to men in the culture in which the Bible was written. They were treated like property, as financial assets, and the idea that they were equal to men would have been considered ridiculous. But there are several passages of scripture which teach that women are equal to men, and that there is no gender hierarchy in the Kingdom of God, in spite of what existed in the culture of the time. Again, the Bible's writers recognize that the unequal treatment of women was a cultural reality, but, in fact, they actually emphasize the equality of women and men under God and in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even the Apostle Paul does this.
In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all and is in all. Colossians 3:11
There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male or female for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:28.
But Southern Baptists aren't applying the same principle of interpretation to scripture that bring women into equality with men as they now do to scripture dealing with slavery.
Dr. Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, took exactly the same "doctrine and order" path that his predecessors did in 1845 when they justified slavery and claimed that the Bible taught white supremacy. So the mistake Southern Baptists made with slavery, a literal interpretation of the words of scripture without considering the context in which they were written, is the same mistake they are now making in prohibiting women from serving in ministry as a bishop, pastor, elder.
But I'd be willing to bet that Dr. Mohler, and other literalist "doctrine and order" Southern Baptists still eat pulled pork sandwiches, cheeseburgers, wear clothes made of mixed fabric and I doubt any of them has executed any of their disobedient children, or torn down their house because they found mold in the bathroom. I don't think you could have a pot-luck dinner in a Southern Baptist church without chicken fried steak and sawmill gravy. And a lot of women attending the SBC in New Orleans were wearing jewelry and make-up, had cut and styled their hair, and some were even wearing pants.
And while I have met many Baptist pastors with children who were rebellious, rejecting their parent's faith, and openly disobedient, I don't see this literal qualification for pastors being enforced by the convention in the same way they are enforcing the restrictions on women. And that's not joking, people. That's sheer hypocrisy and evidence of a grievous theological and doctrinal error along the exact same lines as the one they made with racism and slavery when the denomination was founded in 1845.
Claiming to Believe in "Inerrancy" and Being "Conservative" Doesn't Prevent Theological or Doctrinal Error
Although the SBC operates six theological seminaries, and its regional convention bodies support 50 colleges and universities, most of which provide majors and minors in theology and ministry studies, there is a mistrust of higher education in theology among many of the church members who are uneducated themselves. As one who attended a university that was, at the time I was a student there, affiliated with a state Baptist convention, the contrast between what I learned in the required Biblical studies courses and what I had been taught in my small, Southern Baptist church by Sunday School teachers who didn't even graduate from high school and bi-vocational pastors who had no theological training, was quite different.
After a guest preacher's sermon one Sunday, when I was in high school, I can recall several members of the church, including the Sunday School teacher I had when I was in elementary school, talking about how he used all of that "Greek mumbo-jumbo" that he got at seminary. Southern Baptists have always been suspicious of creeping liberalism, a "slippery slope" mentality, in their seminaries and universities and that led to what is known as the "Conservative Resurgence" gaining control of the governing boards of all six seminaries directly operated by the SBC, starting in 1979.
Since there are multiple books that have been written on the "Conservative Resurgence" and its effect on how theology and doctrine were taught in SBC seminaries, it would be impossible to go into all of the nuances of that here. But, the claim of conservatives who organized the political movement that gained control of the boards was that the professors did not believe in the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, and that this creeping liberalism was opening the door to social issues like feminism. And traditional Baptist view of the interpretation of the Bible, which was to consider the historical context in which it was written before determining the principle or objective that was being made, avoiding interpretations related directly to the cultural and social structure of the day in which it was written in applying the principles to the practice of the gospel of Jesus Christ, was replaced with a literal, verse by verse, approach to intepretation in which errors, like the approval of slavery, or the restrictions against women being seen in church, were made.
Something is Definitely Wrong in the Denomination, But the 2023 Annual Meeting Was Silent About the Cause
For over a decade now, three of the main indicators of denominational health on which Southern Baptists, and in particular the leaders of the Conservative Resurgence, have often staked claims supporting the rightness of their theology and doctrine, have been in decline. Several prominent leaders of the convention once proudly declared that church growth and increasing membership was a sign of God's blessing on the rightness of their way of preaching and teaching, while those "liberal" mainline denominations were breaking down in decline and membership loss, a sign of God's disfavor.
You don't hear that in the Southern Baptist Convention any more. What you do hear, from some of its current leaders, is an array of convoluted excuses and explanations for a decline in membership and attendance in the churches of just over 20% since 2006, when membership peaked at just over 16 million. In the past three years, the denomination's leadership has basically ignored the loss of more than 1.2 million members. They can blame the decrease in attendance on COVID, though in the year prior to the pandemic, the figure they reported for weekly worship attendance was just under 2 million fewer than it had been at its peak just a decade before. But church membership is a different matter.
It took the Episcopal Church in the U.S. two decades to lose 20% of its membership from its peak in the early 1960's, and the now fracturing and fragmenting United Methodists almost three decades to lose 20% of its membership prior to the current situation it faces. Conservatives argue that those denominations and their turn to liberal theology was responsible for the losses. But with the Southern Baptist Convention now seeing even more steep and rapid declines, you can hear the crickets chirping as conservatives who got themselves out on a limb with their proud boasts can't explain what's going on.
The "messengers" to this year's Southern Baptist Convention, which is what they call those who attend the convention who represent their local churches, chose to elevate the expulsion of two churches with female pastors to being the central issue of this year's convention. This in spite of an ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal which is one of several issues that I believe can be considered as primary problems driving the steep decline in membership. They chose to be identified with an issue that isn't behind the problems the SBC is experiencing, making it look like an intentional distraction from their real problems. Only a small handful of Southern Baptist Churches have female staff members designated as a "pastor," but over a thousand churches have contributed statistically to the sexual abuse scandal.
But the misogyny in some of the rhetoric that has been flying around on social media from conservatives in the denomination might be one of the root causes. Attacks on women's rights and the role of women in society are now running in the parallel MAGA universe, along with book banning, attacks on Jews, on virtually any ethnic or social minority group, on anything that isn't part of what some extremists think is their own culture. Twisting the tenents of the Christian faith to support this kind of creeping fascism is one way of gaining legitimacy and support.
The depth of the influence of this attack on women is reflected in this commentary from Jewish Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, published in Religion News: Southern Baptists Don't Like Women Pastors? That Means Trouble for us All.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded on an erroneous interpretation and application of the scripture text of the Protestant Bible. It is capable of making similar errors in interpretation and application of the Biblical text, and it is making one now, contradicting the written word of God regarding the spiritual equality and worth of women as a core principle of the gospel, with prohibitions based on the ancient cultural and social context of the time in which the Bible was written. It has violated one of the core foundational principles that created the Baptist expression of the Christian gospel with an ecclesiastical intrusion into the independence, autonomy and spiritual authority of the local church. And that's why they are facing decay and decline, and are not experiencing revival.
No comments:
Post a Comment