By Greg Warner
Associated Baptist Press
The Baptist Manifesto, a theological statement that emphasizes the role of community in understanding Scripture to counterbalance individual freedom, has been misinterpreted by critics as opposing freedom of conscience, say seven Baptist theologians.
“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,” the theologians said Jan. 31 in a statement released to Associated Baptist Press.
The statement was prompted by a Jan. 20 speech by Bill Underwood, president-elect of Mercer University, to Baptist supporters of the Macon, Ga., school. In a story reported in ABP Jan. 24, Underwood said some ideas in the 1997 Manifesto are un-Baptistic and a threat to religious freedom.
But the seven theologians, five of whom were authors of the Manifesto, say Baptists in America have placed too much emphasis on individual interpretation in the last two centuries and weakened or abandoned their earlier commitment to the role of faith communities, particularly the local church.
“We do not wish to silence others or deny them the freedom that is their birthright in Christ,” the seven wrote. “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.”
In his speech Jan. 20, Underwood cited portions of the Manifesto he said “hinted at the need for spiritual masters to tell us how to interpret the Scriptures.”
One passage in particular: “We therefore cannot commend Bible study that is insulated from the community of believers or guarantees individual readers an unchecked privilege of interpretation.”
But the seven theologians said the Manifesto does not intend that “the individual Christian should unthinkingly kowtow to the majority perspective in the community.”
Instead, they said, the “spiritual masters” of interpretation are, in a sense, those believers of the past whose “wisdom and charity” has been proven over time-such as Abraham and Sarah, Martin Luther and Menno Simons, William Carey and Lottie Moon.
“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,” the theologians said. “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.”
They added: “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.”
Underwood told ABP he can agree with the Manifesto theologians that individual conscience is “inviolable but not infallible” and that the community of faith is essential.
“It would be arrogant not to take into account what other Christians have said,” he noted Feb. 1. “But each of us ultimately has to come to his or her own conclusions.”
“I think we are answerable to God for what we believe; I do not think we are answerable to other human beings.”
Theology professor Steve Harmon, who drafted the theologians' response to Underwood, agreed to a point.
“Each one if us is ultimately directly accountable to God, but we are helped toward being accountable to God by the community that forms us as individuals,” said Harmon, associate professor at Campbell University Divinity School, a Baptist school in Buies Creek, N.C.
Harmon said Christianity is “a way of life that is inescapably communal; it can't be done in isolation.”
He said Baptists have not always overemphasized the individual. “If you dig back into the 17th century, you find more balance of the individual in community, whereas the emphasis we've derived from our culture, particularly in the 20th century, is more of a radical autonomy.”
Curtis Freeman, director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., agreed community was more prominent in Baptist thought “until very recently.”
“It's not just me and Jesus,” said Freeman, research professor of theology at Duke and a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “The church is more than an aggregate of individuals, … like a bunch of marbles in a bag-you just pour them in and pour them out again.”
“The conviction that drives me in this,” said Freeman, one of the authors of the Manifesto in 1997, “is the promise that Jesus gives: Where two or three are gathered, Jesus is there with them. It doesn't say ‘where I gather with my hat' or ‘where I sit down with my Bible.' That's what we have to wrestle with. That kind of individualism makes ecclessiology very hard to conceive of.”
On one point at least, all three agreed-there's no place for coercion in authentic faith. When the individual submits to the community's correction, it has to be voluntary.
“If that's the bottom line,” Underwood said, “then we probably don't disagree.”
And while the tension between the individual and community remains prominent in Baptist rhetoric, the three agreed Baptist practice is more uniform. With small-group Bible studies, intercessory prayer chains and the like, Baptists practice community within their congregations.
“Maybe our practice undercuts our rhetoric,” Freeman concluded.
In addition to Freeman and Harmon, the theologians drafting the Jan. 31 statement are Mikael Broadway, assistant professor of theology and ethics at Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, N.C.; Barry Harvey, associate professor of theology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; Elizabeth Newman, professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond; Mark Medley, associate professor of theology at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Ky; and Philip Thompson, associate professor of systematic theology and Christian heritage at North American Baptist Seminary in Sioux Falls, S.D.