As authors (Broadway, Freeman, Harvey, Newman, Thompson) and advocates (Harmon, Medley) of the 1997 statement “Re-envisioning Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America,” we are delighted to see the “Manifesto” re-enter the consciousness of the Baptist public through Bill Underwood's recent speech to supporters of Mercer University (Associated Baptist Press, January 24, 2006). Heretofore we believed the only people who still thought about the “Manifesto” were a few Baptist theology professors and their students; we are glad to be mistaken.
This sort of description of our perspectives on the relationship between the community and the individual in Baptist faith and practice does not reflect our convictions. Like our critics, we reject any form of authoritative coercion that stifles the earnest contestation of truth by the community. But when our concerns about an individualistic reading of the Scriptures are taken to mean that we believe the individual Christian should unthinkingly kowtow to the majority perspective in the community, justice is not done to the text of the “Manifesto” or its intent.
Underwood quoted from the “Manifesto” a passage that he identified as “dangerous and un-Baptistic” thinking: “Scripture wisely forbids and we reject every form of private interpretation that makes Bible reading a practice which can be carried out according to the dictates of individual conscience. We therefore cannot commend Bible study that is insulated from the community of believers or guarantees individual readers an unchecked privilege of interpretation.”
Quoting these sentences in isolation ignores a crucial statement in the preceding paragraph: “We thus affirm an open and orderly process whereby faithful communities deliberate together over the Scriptures with sisters and brothers of the faith, excluding no light from any source. When all exercise their gifts and callings, when every voice is heard and weighed, when no one is silenced or privileged, the Spirit leads communities to read wisely and to practice faithfully the direction of the gospel (1 Cor. 14:26-29).” That gives a very different sense of the “Manifesto.”
While we reject the authoritarian subjugation of individual conscience, there is a sense in which we do believe in being subject to “spiritual masters”—but not self-appointed ones. We look instead to those whose wisdom and charity have proved themselves over the centuries: Abraham and Sarah, Miriam and Moses, Paul and Priscilla, and other biblical exemplars of faith; Augustine and Athanasius; Martin Luther and Menno Simons; John Smyth and Thomas Helwys; Katherine Sutton and Ann Judson; William Carey and Lottie Moon; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day; and Muriel Lester and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few.
Just as the tradition of legal interpretation protects American citizens from the tyranny of momentary and arbitrary renderings of the law, so the church's tradition of biblical interpretation supplies those who seek to understand and embody the Scriptures with precedents that can free them from the constraints of subjectivity. If our consciences are not accountable to others who have sought to understand and embody the Scriptures in contexts other than our own, then we have no need to have millions of hungry, homeless mouths telling us that we may be skipping over some of the most important parts of the Bible.
We believe that competency in the interpretation of the Scriptures is not something that is injected into our brains at birth—it is not “common sense”—nor is it something that we acquire in a moment of conversion, and it is never unaided. Rather, one learns it over time, and always in conversation with saints past and present, famous and anonymous, who constitute the one body of Christ guided by the Holy Spirit.
We believe with early Baptists and the mainstream Christian tradition that an individual's conscience is inviolable, but not infallible, and therefore we are always under the obligation to see to it that our consciences have been formed by the faithful practices of the church. It is in this context that dissent becomes an expression of the church's commitment to truth and divine justice.
Some of us teach in seminaries, divinity schools, and Baptist houses of studies that are theological education partners of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. All of us have felt alienated from the Southern Baptist ecclesial home of our Christian nurture. We do not wish to silence others or deny them the freedom that is their birthright in Christ. But we have come to believe that while autonomous individualism may seem to offer some protection from authoritarian coercion, in reality it creates a lonely society of moral strangers.
The Baptist battles have left an enduring legacy of polarizing divisions between north and south, black and white, liberal and conservative, right and left. What we have tried to articulate is a dynamic center that offers alternatives to the polarization that exists in our culture and our churches.
Having said these things, we are grateful for Underwood's contributions to the much-needed public conversation about the future of Baptist higher education, and we want Mercer University to succeed under his leadership. We hope also that he has succeeded in making Baptists curious about the “Baptist Manifesto” and its vision for the Baptist future.
Mikael Broadway is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, North Carolina;, Curtis Freeman is Research Professor of Theology and Director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina; Steven Harmon is Associate Professor of Christian Theology at Campbell University Divinity School in Buies Creek, North Carolina; Barry Harvey is Associate Professor of Theology in the Honors College and Graduate Faculty in Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; Elizabeth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Virginia; Mark Medley is Associate Professor of Theology at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky; and Philip Thompson is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Heritage at North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The text of the “Manifesto” is available online at http://home.sprintmail.com/~masthewitt/baptists/manifesto.html.
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