Jan. 20, 2006
I want to thank each of you for caring enough about Mercer to be here – for caring enough about Baptist life to be here – for caring enough about the principles upon which Mercer was founded to be here. And I want to thank you for being so gracious in welcoming me to Georgia.
I'm a Baptist. I was born into a Baptist family. My father was an old-style Baptist preacher and evangelist. I grew up on the campuses of Baptist schools where my father was attending. I graduated from a Baptist university, where I met my wife Lesli, a Baptist choir director and teacher's daughter. I've spent most of my professional life on the campus of Baylor University, where I have had the opportunity to think a great deal about what it means to be a Baptist university and how the Baptist identity of that great university could be preserved.
Lesli and I considered other denominations after we were married. We didn't like much of what we saw happening in Southern Baptist life. But we ultimately decided to remain Baptists. Baptists have stood for principles that are important – principles that we are deeply committed to – principles that are worth preserving. These principles are what this summit is all about. Mercer is Baptist. Mercer will remain Baptist. Not because there is some marketing advantage to being Baptist. But because the Baptist principles that Mercer represents must be preserved. Those principles have defined Baptist life since the 17th century. They have defined the religious fabric of our country. Baptists saw to it that Baptist principles found there way into the Bill of Rights. I'd like to talk about those principles. And then talk about how those principles relate to our future together here at Mercer.
Let me begin with a wonderful old story — a story I first heard from my friend and colleague Buddy Shurden. It's a story about a Jew, a Catholic, and a Baptist who were debating a theological issue:
— The Jew spoke first, and began his argument, “Thus saith the Lord!”
— The Catholic responded, “As the Church has always said.”
— When it was the Baptist's turn to speak, he begin, “Now, brethren, it seems to me.”
This story reveals an idea that we Baptists have historically embraced — the principle that that we are free to think for ourselves. We are free to read the Scriptures. We are free to come to our own conclusions about what they mean, as we are led by the Holy Spirit. No government authority has the right to tell us what to believe. Likewise, no Baptist has the right to tell any other Baptist what he or she must believe.
There are serious challenges today to this idea of individual freedom of conscience. And not only from fundamentalists. One of our most prominent and influential Protestant theologians, Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School, wrote several years ago that: “No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.”
Hauerwas explained that: “I certainly believe that God uses the Scripture to help keep the Church faithful, but I do not believe that each person in the Church is thereby given the right to interpret the Scripture. Such a presumption derives from the corrupt egalitarian politics of democratic regimes not from the politics of the Church. The latter knows that the right reading of the Scripture depends on having spiritual masters who can help the whole Church stand under the authority of God's word.”
Hauerwas is no fundamentalist. And he certainly is no Baptist. Nonetheless, this idea of spiritual masters who will tell us what to believe is becoming increasingly popular in Baptist circles. Under the influence of Hauerwas and others, those involved in framing a document called the Baptist Manifesto as a Anew theological direction for Baptists have hinted at the need for spiritual masters to tell us how to interpret the Scriptures.
According to the Baptist Manifesto: “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.”
What is clear from the Baptist Manifesto is that our privilege of interpretation is somehow to be checked. What is less clear is who will provide this check? Is it the community of believers? If so, what community? Our Sunday school class? Our church? Our broader Baptist associations? How would the check work? Would the community take a vote? Would a simple majority be sufficient to declare one believer's interpretation of the Scriptures heresy? What then would we do with the heretic?
The Manifesto never clearly addresses these rather obvious and troubling questions, but does hint that: Because some members are specifically called to equip the saints everyone has something to learn from those with equipping gifts.
Might it be that those with “equipping gifts” would be our spiritual masters? Would these spiritual masters provide the check? Would they decide what is heresy? Of course, this raises the further question of how we would decide who would be our spiritual masters?
This latter question has presented no real difficulty to politicians in the Southern Baptist Convention, who have declared themselves to be our spiritual masters. Nowhere have they made this any clearer than in the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, which refers to itself as an Ainstrument of doctrinal accountability.
“A Doctrinal accountability?” Now that's an interesting concept. And one that has never before appeared in a Baptist confessional statement, at least not to my knowledge. Accountability to who?
Surely a human confessional statement isn't required in order for God to hold us accountable. Could it be that denominational politicians contemplate that we will be held accountable for what we believe to our “spiritual masters” — to denominational politicians themselves?
The 2000 Baptist Faith & Message identifies a number of doctrines that self-declared denominational spiritual masters have determined to be Aessential to the Baptist tradition of faith and practice.
“Essential?” That's also an interesting term. Essential for what? To be a Christian? To be a Baptist? Among the doctrines that these spiritual masters have declared as essential is the following: While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.
We know that the apostle Paul wrote, in the context of advising Timothy, that he “would not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.” But we also know that the first person Jesus instructed to proclaim the gospel following the resurrection was Mary Magdaline.
We also know that Jesus later reproached his disciples for not listening to her. And didn't Jesus encourage the woman of Samaria to return to the city from the well and declare the gospel. Didn't she ultimately succeed in bringing many Samaritans in the city to Christ? Shouldn't Paul be interpreted in light of Jesus, rather than Jesus in light of Paul? And didn't Paul write in his letter to the churches of Galatia that “there is neither male nor female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”
According to at least some Southern Baptists, we're not supposed to ask these questions. We're simply to accept their conclusions. Indeed, unless one accepts the doctrines they have declared as Aessential@ B unless one conforms to the litmus test handed down by SBC spiritual masters, he or she must be held accountable. This has certainly proven to be true for denominational workers, for missionaries, and for local churches.
And it has also proven true for those who teach in Baptist colleges, universities, and seminaries. Taking the idea of spiritual masters and doctrinal accountability from our churches to our universities, some have suggested that there is no place in a Christian university to advocate ideas contrary to what university or denominational authorities have chosen to declare as orthodox — that those who teach and learn in Baptist institutions of higher learning must conform to doctrinal prescriptions — that even in our universities, we are not free to think for ourselves.
We saw that here at Mercer in 1996 when our president was censored by the Georgia Baptist Convention for thoughtfully expressing his ideas about the grace of God — ideas that were contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. At Baylor University, our former chief academic officer prepared a doctrinal statement that he described as a Baptist “mini-theology.” He then proposed an academic freedom policy that would prohibit faculty from advocating contrary to Baptist faith and practice.
Illustrating where this idea can lead, a prominent Baptist denominational leader has declared that if we say pickles have souls, then our schools “must teach that pickles have souls.” Under this idea of doctrinal accountability to human authority, we would have spiritual masters to tell us what to teach, what to learn, and what to believe.
Of course, there is nothing new about this idea. There have always been those who have claimed the status of spiritual master over others — those who have taken it upon themselves to decide what others must believe. The scribes and the Pharisees fancied themselves experts on what the Scriptures meant. They set themselves up as the spiritual masters for others. Yet Jesus specifically warned his disciples to “beware” of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.
In what would prove to be the last public sermon of his ministry, Jesus rebuked the spiritual masters of his day in Matthew 23 saying:
“Do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. Do not be called leaders, for One is your Leader, that is, Christ.”
In condemning the idea of spiritual masters, Jesus taught us that no man stands between us and direct access to God through Jesus Christ.
That great Baptist preacher George W. Truett said in his famous sermon on Baptists and Religious Liberty that: The right of private judgment is the crown jewel of humanity, and for any person or institution to dare to come between the soul and God is blasphemous impertinence….
This belief is central to our understanding of the relationship between God and individual believers. And it has been fundamental to our understanding of individual freedom of conscience and self-determination.
God has given us intellects. God has given us the gift of reason. This gift makes us distinct from all other creation. Jesus has commanded us to honor and cherish this gift. To use our minds. To love God with our hearts and our souls — but also to love God with our minds. Surely, keeping this greatest of all commandments requires us to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions.
My current provost at Baylor put it this way, “Jesus came to take away our sins — not our minds.” Indeed, when we stand before God on judgment day, how many of us believe that it would be a defense to God's judgment to say that we just did what we were told by our spiritual masters? The truth is that we are responsible for our souls. We will be judged as individuals — not as communities.
It is this individual responsibility that compels us to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions. This is what Baptists have believed from the beginning. It is a part of our earliest heritage. Freedom of individual conscience. Respect for the freedom of others who disagree. And individual responsibility. These have been bedrock Baptist principles. These principles are at stake at this moment in Baptist history.
That we are free to come to our own conclusions does not mean that there is no objective truth — that just anything goes — that one person's conclusion is just as valid as that of another, no matter what it might be — that we embrace some sort of “radical subjectivity” — that we are “cultural relativists.”
We know that there is truth. We know that sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes our ideas ought to be rejected by others. Our great theologians are sometimes wrong. Our philosophers can be wrong. Our preachers can be wrong. Even our university presidents are sometimes wrong.
We know and acknowledge that no one of us is perfect — that no one of us has perfect knowledge — that no one of us has perfect access to truth. How, then, can any of us be so certain that we have discovered truth — so certain that we would discourage others from continuing to inquire, from continuing to question, from perhaps even daring to disagree? How can any of us be so arrogant?
At the same time, the fact that we are free to think for ourselves does not mean that we should ignore the thoughts of others. There are many great thinkers among us. And there have been many great thinkers who have gone before. It would be equally arrogant for us to ignore their ideas.
Our responsibility to use our intellects, to think for ourselves, to come to our own conclusions has important consequences for Christian higher education in Baptist universities like Mercer. To be a great Baptist university, we must be a great university. To be a great university, we must be committed to the pursuit of truth.
This pursuit of truth requires exposing our students to God's truth as revealed through a serious and thoughtful examination of the Scriptures, as we do in courses in Old and New Testament. It requires exposing our students to the great thinkers of today and yesterday. Not so that they will blindly accept the conclusions of others. But instead to aid them in their search for truth. That's what our Great Texts program at Mercer is all about — exposing our students to great thinkers, including great Christian thinkers like Aquinas, Anselm and Augustine.
Christian universities must also equip our students with the critical thinking skills needed for a lifelong pursuit of truth. This requires encouraging our students to think for themselves — to test the ideas of the great thinkers — and then to test their own ideas in free and open discourse with others. We know that it is this free exchange of ideas that is most likely to lead to the discovery of truth. This is the idea behind our system of justice, where we discover truth in the courtroom through the clash of competing evidence and the clash of competing ideas.
It's the idea behind the First Amendment. A great thinker named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Consistent with Holmes' metaphor of a free marketplace of ideas, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that our future as a people “depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritarian selection.”
If we are to be a great Christian university, we cannot be afraid to pursue the course of truth, wherever that course might lead. Indeed, if our pursuit of truth leads us to question our existing view of God, it may just be that God is trying to tell us something.
Recall that at one time the prevailing orthodoxy in the Church was that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun revolved around the earth. Heaven was somewhere up above the clouds. This orthodoxy was supported by a literal interpretation of Psalms chapter 104, verse 5, which says that God “fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.” Galileo was condemned by the Church in 1633 for challenging this orthodoxy when he published his conclusion that the earth rotated around the Sun B a conclusion that the Church finally admitted was true 359 years later in 1992.
At one time the prevailing orthodoxy in the South held that the Bible supported the institution of slavery. This was based on passages like the one in Paul's first letter to Timothy that “all who are under the yoke of slavery shall regard their masters with honor….” Within the lifetimes of most of us here, the most Christians in Georgia and throughout the South believed that passages in the Bible, including the so-called “Hamitic curse” found in Genesis chapter 9, required segregation — segregation in our schools, our places of public accommodation, and in our churches. That was the prevailing orthodoxy.
How many other beliefs at one time firmly held as true have been proven false with the passage of time? What so-called “truths” that we hold dear today will the passage of time prove false? And how will we know if we accept what others have declared as orthodox without question? What this means is that our faculty and students must be free to discuss, advocate, and debate even ideas that are controversial — even ideas that challenge prevailing viewpoints.
During the spring of 2004, a group of Baylor students published an editorial in the student newspaper arguing that prohibiting gay marriage was unconstitutional. The president of the University reacted by threatening to expel the students for having advocated a viewpoint contrary to what most members of the Baylor community believed.
I too disagreed with the students' viewpoint, but I disagreed even more with the reaction of our president. The president's reaction ended any further discussion. And our academic community lost a valuable opportunity to gain new insights through an intellectually rigorous examination of the issue. Examination, discussion, and debate as to how we relate to gay and lesbian individuals is an important component of our pursuit of truth. What better place for such discussion to occur than on the campus of a Baptist university, where Christian perspectives on the issue are welcome B perspectives that simply would not be a part of the dialogue on many campuses.
If all we have is freedom from external religious dictates, we're no different than the state schools. They have that freedom. Our freedom is broader and deeper than that. We are free from external dictates. And we are also free to examine our faith and how it relates to issues across the academic spectrum.
As a forum for the a full and robust exchange of competing ideas, a Baptist university has a distinct advantage over state-sponsored schools — an advantage under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which mandates that any discussion of religion and theology at state universities must be from a neutral, secular perspective. Studying religion and theology under this restriction is like eating ice cream without the cream. The richness, the flavor, the texture is lacking.
We can have the cream at a faith-based university like Mercer. Unlike the University of Georgia, we are not bound by the Establishment Clause. There are no external legal restrictions on our freedom of academic inquiry. We are free not only to examine issues from a secular perspective, we are also free to examine those issues from the perspective of persons of faith.
As faculty at Mercer, we have more freedom than our counterparts at state schools. I am free to offer a course on Law, Public Policy, and the Scriptures if that is my choice, as I did at Baylor. This is the legal right of those of us who teach and learn at a private faith-based university like Mercer. Our faculty should be encouraged to take advantage of this freedom. Doing so can provide for a richer education than is available at competing schools. It can give us a distinct advantage over state-sponsored schools in the marketplace of higher education.
We not only have an advantage over state schools, Baptist universities also enjoy an advantage among other faith-based schools. We have no pronouncements by the organized Church to limit our exchange of ideas, as do some Christian universities. And, at least historically, we have had no binding denominational creeds, as do some evangelical colleges, that might otherwise be used to limit inquiry.
What Baptist universities have instead is the historical and theological commitment of Baptists to individual freedom of thought and expression. Because of our Baptist commitment to freedom, we among all universities, faith-based or secular, should have the most open and robust exchange of ideas B the fullest and most rewarding pursuit of truth. This can be the exciting future of Baptist higher education at Mercer.
There are two threats that have confronted all Baptist universities. The first is a threat that I have already mentioned. A threat posed by those who fear where free debate and inquiry in our institutions of higher education will lead — those who are afraid of defending their own Christian perspectives in an open forum. Those who fear defeat in the marketplace of ideas. They advocate accountability to binding statements of doctrine. They advocate restrictions on freedom of inquiry that would stifle the robust exchange of ideas necessary to seek the truth, that would bring about stagnation in our faith, that would destroy our theological and historical commitment as Baptists to individual freedom of conscience, that would place designated human arbiters between us and God. A number of once fine Baptist schools have been lost to the threat of fundamentalism. At Mercer we are free of this threat.
But there is a second threat. One that is every bit as real. The threat of secularization — of dismissing faith perspectives from our university as somehow illegitimate — as unscientific and thus lacking any relevance in the academy. By dismissing Christian and other faith perspectives from the truth-seeking process, a number of formerly Baptist universities have forfeited perhaps the most significant intellectual advantage they enjoy over state-sponsored schools. To preserve our heritage as a great Baptist university, to realize our potential as a great Baptist university, we must also resist the threat of secularization.
Fully embracing our freedom of academic inquiry is central to preserving our Baptist identity, let me add that being free is not alone enough. Being Baptist is about a great deal more than simply being free. We have responsibilities.
We have a responsibility to not abuse our freedom. While I have the freedom to speak as a citizen of the United States, I have the responsibility not to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. I have the freedom to interpret the Scriptures and come to my own conclusions, but Paul cautions me to “take care that this liberty … does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” I have the freedom to critically examine all issues, but I have a responsibility to the generations of Georgia Baptists who have built, nurtured and sustained this university to be respectful of their beliefs, even as I disagree.
Our responsibility to Baptists also includes continuing to serve Baptist communities. Providing financial assistance to Baptist students who desire the very special type of education available here at Mercer is one aspect of that service. As Dr. Godsey pointed out yesterday, those scholarships have not been funded by Georgia Baptists alone — Mercer University has provided $3 in scholarship assistance for every $1 provided by the GBC — over $11 million in direct financial aid from Mercer to Georgia Baptist students last year alone.
Training leadership for Baptist churches through the McAfee School of Theology as well as the Townsend Institute for Church Music are critically important ways that we serve Baptist communities. Indeed, there is nothing more important to free Baptists than the training future ministers are receiving at McAfee.
Further development of the Center for Baptist Studies is another important dimension of our service to Baptists throughout the world. Our support of communications among Baptists, through publications like Baptists Today is an important service to Baptists. The Mercer Press is perhaps the single most important vehicle for expanding the intellectual life of Baptists. Bill Brackney's outstanding Genetic History of Baptists, published two years ago by the Mercer Press, is just one example.
We are searching for other ways for Mercer to be of service to Baptists and I have heard many good ideas at this summit. Mercer can be the single greatest resource in Baptist life, if Baptists will embrace us. Mercer may be the best hope for preserving the principles that have defined Baptists.
Today, there remain relatively few Baptist universities that have not been lost to either the threat of fundamentalism or the threat of secularization. Among those that remain, fewer than a handful have the strength and resources to emerge as great national universities. Mercer is one of the very few. Together, we can do it here. The fact that no one else has done it should not be discouraging — to the contrary, that's what provides us with the opportunity to do something truly special. Mercer can be the intellectual engine of a dynamic worldwide free Baptist movement.
I want to close by returning to the Mercer experience. I've spoken a great deal about freedom and the power of ideas. But I want to close by talking about people, because more than anything else, Christian higher education is about preparing caring, moral and ethical servant leaders in fields such as medicine, law, theology, business, education and engineering who understand and embrace their responsibility for improving the human condition.
I believe in my soul that the ultimate measure of the greatness of a university is not found in U.S. News & World Report. The ultimate measure is instead the extent to which a university transforms the lives of individual students, who in turn transform their communities for the better. By this measure, Mercer is a truly great Christian university — a university that has produced an army of caring and committed doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, preachers, lawyers, judges, politicians and businesspeople who are changing their communities for the better throughout Georgia and beyond.
The transformation that takes place in the lives of our students occurs largely because of the special relationships that they develop here at Mercer, including the special relationships that develop between students and faculty. Faculty who care about our students as individuals. Faculty who become their mentors.
When I hear folks talk about the “Mercer experience,” I think I know what they're talking about. When I enrolled as a freshman at Michigan State University, I was truly a lost soul. I had no idea why I was in college. I was classes with hundreds of other students. There was no one there who cared whether I stayed or whether I left.
After two years of unloading banana boats and other hard labor in Southern California, I transferred to Oklahoma Baptist University, where two faculty members took a special interest in me. They saw potential in me. They cared about me. I would not be here today had it not been for these two very special faculty members.
Generations of Mercer students have benefitted from this very type of life transforming experience. That, I think, is the “Mercer experience.” And that, I think, more than anything else is what being a great Baptist university is all about.
This is a new morning. I hope you will join us in working to preserve and extend the “Mercer experience” for future generations.
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