By Bob Allen
A Baptist historian compared today’s battle for the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious freedom to courageous heroes who resisted the Nazis in Germany.
Timothy George speaks to students and faculty of Judson College in chapel before conducting an afternoon seminar for area ministers. Some 50 pastors attended the seminar on the church’s involvement in the political arena. (Photo by Bill Mathews)
|
Timothy George, dean of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School, told a group of ministers Jan. 17 that “The Manhattan Declaration,” a document he wrote in 2009 with Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship and Robert George of Princeton University, was inspired by the Barmen Declaration of 1934.
At a seminar co-sponsored by Judson College and the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, George handed out copies of his 4,700-word manifesto that includes a pledge to civil disobedience of laws that would compel religious institutions to perform abortions or same-sex marriages.
“This document isn’t a political one, but a moral one,” George said, according to a news story about the event written by the Judson College communications office. “It’s an example of the church taking a stand on issues and reaching across dividing lines to find support from people of various political and religious persuasions. I think this is what the church can and should do.”
George said in an article in the Spring 2011 issue of the Beeson magazine that the Manhattan Declaration was written on the 75th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, a statement of the “Confessing Church” done in response to the strongly nationalistic and anti-Semitic “German Christian” movement that supported Hitler.
Early drafts of the Manhattan Declaration cited Barmen as precedent, George said, but those references were deleted because “the plight of the church in North America today, serious as it is, is not analogous to the repression Jews, Christians and many others experienced in Hitler’s Germany.”
George went on to enumerate parallels between the two documents. Both, he said, “appeal to the authority of Holy Scripture.”
“Each offers quotations from the Bible as the theological basis of its statements,” he explained. “Each recognizes that the Christian faith can be, and often has been, distorted by accommodation to the ‘prevailing ideological and political convictions’ of the day.”
George said like Barmen, the Manhattan statement is not “political” in the sense of being tied to a particular party or ideology. Democrats, Republicans and independents have all signed on.
“Some say today that the church should take a sabbatical from speaking to the culture at large,” George said. “Hitler himself was happy (at least for a while) to leave the Christians alone so long as they stayed within the four walls of their church buildings and refrained from ‘meddling’ in matters related to public policy and the common life of the German people. But both Barmen and Manhattan refuse to say that there are areas of life which do not belong to Jesus Christ. Both affirm the sovereignty of God and the lordship of Jesus Christ.”
Finally, George said, both documents recognize “the cost of discipleship.”
“Both call for the kind of conscientious courage that dares to count the cost of following Jesus Christ along the way that leads finally to the cross,” he wrote.
At the Alabama gathering, George said nearly 500,000 people have signed the Manhattan Declaration. He said the document, controversial for defining marriage as between one man and one woman, has been widely misunderstood as espousing intolerance toward gays.
“It is the marriage section that’s brought more criticism,” George said. “Some have accused us of being hateful, but there’s not a word of condemnation in the document against the gay community. What we argue for is ‘the common good’ that enriches society.”
Baptist leaders who have sighed the Manhattan Declaration include Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Mark Coppenger, director of the Nashville extension center of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; David Dockery, president of Union University; former Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham; Richard Land, head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission; Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Russell Moore, Southern Seminary’s senior vice president and theology dean; Bob Reccord, founder of Total Life Impact and former president of the SBC North American Mission Board; and Hayes Wicker, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Naples, Fla., where Colson is a member.