MACON, Ga. (ABP) — Baptists need no “spiritual masters” — either from the right or the left — to tell them what to believe in their churches or universities, said Bill Underwood, incoming president of Mercer University.
Any attempt to impose orthodoxy on believers threatens the individual freedom of conscience, Underwood said Jan. 20 in his first major speech to supporters of the Baptist university, which was recently jettisoned from a 173-year relationship by the Georgia Baptist Convention.
“This is what Baptists have believed from the beginning,” the Baylor University law professor said. “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.”
Individual freedom — and academic freedom in Baptist universities — are under threat from those who would restrict the open pursuit of truth, said Underwood, who was elected Mercer president Dec. 2 and will replace retiring president Kirby Godsey.
Sometimes that threat comes from fundamentalists, who “advocate restrictions on freedom of inquiry that would stifle the robust exchange of ideas necessary to seek the truth,” he said. But even some Christians on the other end of the spectrum are afraid to trust individual believers to find the truth.
Underwood, reprising comments from a December commencement address at Baylor, quoted Duke Divinity School theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who wrote in a 1993 book: “No task is more important than for the church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America.”
“I certainly believe that God uses the Scripture to help keep the Church faithful,” Hauerwas wrote in Unleashing the Scripture, “but I do not believe that each person in the Church is thereby given the right to interpret the Scripture. … The [Church] 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.
Underwood said Hauerwas' view is also seen in the Baptist Manifesto, a theological statement, drafted and supported by some prominent moderate and progressive Baptists, that emphasizes the role of community as a balance to individual freedom. Underwood said the Manifesto “hinted at the need for spiritual masters to tell us how to interpret the Scriptures.”
According to the 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.”
Such thinking is dangerous and un-Baptistic, Underwood said.
“How would the check work?” he asked the Mercer audience. “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?”
Underwood said “politicians in the Southern Baptist Convention” already “have declared themselves our spiritual masters” in the 2000 “Baptist Faith and Message” statement. That Southern Baptist statement calls itself an “instrument of accountability,” a claim Underwood said “has never before appeared in a Baptist confessional statement, at least not to my knowledge.”
“Accountability to who?” he continued. “Surely a human confessional statement isn't required in order for God to hold us accountable.”
Jesus warned his followers not to submit to the scribes and Pharisees, Jewish religious leaders who “set themselves up as spiritual masters for others,” Underwood said.
“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?” Underwood asked. “The truth is that we are responsible for our souls. We will be judged as individuals, not as communities.”
Underwood likewise defended the liberty of conscience in academia, saying Mercer must be willing to challenge the “prevailing orthodoxy.”
“If we are to be a great Christian university, we cannot be afraid to pursue the course of truth, wherever that course might lead,” he said. “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.”
In the past, he said, prevailing Christian orthodoxy defended both a flat earth and slavery using the Bible.
“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 ideas that are controversial, even ideas that challenge prevailing viewpoints.”
Underwood, who served as Baylor's interim president, said he disagreed with his predecessor's decision threatening to expel students who wrote an editorial arguing a ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional.
“I too disagreed with the students' viewpoint, but I disagreed even more with the reaction of our president,” he said. “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.”
A similar controversy over homosexuality at Mercer prompted the divorce with the Georgia Baptist Convention.
“What better place for such discussion to occur than on the campus of a Baptist university, where Christian perspectives on the issue are welcome — perspectives that simply would not be a part of the dialogue on many campuses,” Underwood said.
Underwood said Mercer and other Christian schools, contrary to popular belief, have more freedom to debate such controversial issues than secular universities, which are legally bound to maintain “a neutral, secular perspective.”
“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,” he said.
“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 — the fullest and most rewarding pursuit of truth. This can be the exciting future of Baptist higher education at Mercer.”
While some historically Baptist universities have surrendered academic freedom to the influence of fundamentalism, Underwood said, others have fallen to the threat of secularism.
“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.”
By resisting both fundamentalism and secularism, Mercer is one of fewer than five Baptist universities with a chance “to emerge as a truly great national university,” Underwood said.
But even more important than intellectual freedom, Underwood added, “Christian higher education is about preparing caring, moral and ethical servant leaders” in all fields of endeavor.
“I believe in my soul that the ultimate measure of the greatness of a university is … the extent to which a university transforms the lives of individual students, who in turn transform their communities for the better.”
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