Are Southern Baptists Choosing Culture Wars over Catholicity?

I was alerted by Denny Burk’s tweets to Dr. Jason Allen’s Duke K. McCall Leadership Lecture at Southern Seminary.

In many ways, it was heartwarming to see a proud graduate of a distinguished seminary return and speak so well of their experience there, to describe his call to ministry, and then set forth a vision for Southern Baptist leadership.

Allen says some very good stuff, especially on leadership as stewardship, and stewardship as contextual. He also wants to see the SBC carry forward its mission in a complex environment and he believes that God can still use the SBC despite their challenges. I also admire his focus on the local church.

His first point was, “Choose Biblical Conviction Over Cultural Accommodation.”

I think this is actually a good point … in principle. Accommodated Christianity is compromised Christianity. Whether we are talking about atonement, anthropology, or church unity, fidelity in faith matters more than being liked by those in the echelons of power. We need, therefore, to have the courage of our creeds and confessions to go against the grain. We need to be, as Athanasius was, Contra Mundum, against the world! We also need to be able to articulate, proclaim, and defend our faith in an adversarial context. Allen stresses, rightly, we should be more than adherents, we should be advocates.

What I would have added to Allen’s talk at this point is the qualification that there are progressive and conservative versions of accommodation. Mixing Christianity with culture is done just as much by progressive Episcopalians as by conservative Southern Baptists. Alas, the door to comprise swings to the left and to the right.

But then, Allen listed the SBC confessions to be defended, and he mentioned four specific ones. They are, in the order he said them: The Danvers Statement on complementarianism, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the Nashville Statement on gender and sexuality, and the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. These are the confessions that Southern Baptists should purportedly advocate. And, what is more, Allen made it clear that anyone who is not a die-hard and vocal enthusiast for these documents is, in his, words “compromised.” So it’s not enough to affirm them, one must proclaim them, or else you are not truly loyal to the Southern Baptist Convention. This is where some knowledge of in-group and out-group sociology made me think, “Wow, way to shrink the in-group by ‘othering’ fellow members who do not adjust their beliefs to a narrower set of doctrinal parameters.” More on that in a minute.

Then, SWEET MOTHER OF MELCHIZEDEK, Allen uses the craziest America war metaphor I’ve ever heard (see 20:11 min). He said the SBC should not be like America in the first Gulf War. America led a broad coalition, but because it was a broad coalition with many voices, it restricted what America could do - and that’s a bad thing. Instead, Allen stated that the SBC should be like America in the second Gulf War (i.e., Iraq), where it acted unilaterally and focused on its mission and not on building a coalition. Oh man, I don’t know how he said that with a straight face. Okay, here’s the thing, America won the first Gulf War and looked like the good guy. Whereas the second Gulf War was a colossal cluster based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, it turned the whole world against America after 9/11, and its single greatest accomplishment was the creation of ISIS.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, then, at 22:00 mins, he said: “If someone leaves the Southern Baptist convention church, a brother or sister, leaves to go to a similarly conservative Bible-believing fellowship of churches that may say something about us. If they leave our fellowship to go to a church or collection of churches that is clearly to the left of the Southern Baptist Convention that may say something about them.” I take that as a lament that Russell Moore was lost to the non-denoms, but a slam of the door and “Good riddance” to Beth Moore who went Anglican. Maybe, just maybe, some people get identified as “leftists” by staying still and standing firm when everyone else runs to the right in some weird race to be the most conservative guy in the room.

Okay, let me get back to Allen’s list of confessions. Now, what is grossly ironic, is that Allen decries accommodation to culture, and yet the majority of the documents he wishes to advocate for are parochially American cultural war documents. Danvers was precipitated by the Equal Rights Act and Nashville is a response to the Obergefell decision. That is not to say that the contents of all these documents is completely wrong, but they are largely in-house debates about intra-American issues.

Notice too what Allen did not include. He did not mention the Apostles’ Creed, he did not mention the Nicene Creed, he did not mention the 1689 London Baptist Confession, and he did not mention the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. He ignores catholic and consensual documents and focuses on statements that emerged from and for the American context. In other words, note this, it’s not a fight over Christianity versus culture, it is a fight over different types of American cultural Christianity.

What shall we say about this?