HOUSTON (ABP) — Baptists must aspire to the kind of freedom that leads them to relinquish their autonomy to God, historian Walter Shurden told participants at the William H. Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society’s annual meeting July 2.
Shurden received the society’s 2009 Courage Award at the meeting, held during the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Houston. He recently retired as a professor and chairman of the department of Christianity at Mercer University and as founding executive director of Mercer’s Center for Baptist Studies.
Throughout his career, Shurden has been a builder of significant Baptist institutions, noted Melissa Rogers, the society’s president. She cited the Center for Baptist Studies and the Whitsitt Society itself, as well as the CBF.
Shurden also is a “dogged defender of Baptist principles and Christian principles,” Rogers added.
Delivering the annual address that accompanies the Courage Award, Shurden focused on a slate of principles and corollary weaknesses. But he also challenged Baptists to exercise one of their most cherished principles — freedom.
The principle of “voluntarism, freedom and human choice” is a historic Baptist distinctive that particularly has marked so-called moderate Baptists, Shurden said. Baptist freedom sometimes has been mischaracterized as license when, in reality, it also involves responsibility, he noted.
Ultimate freedom comes from God, and ultimate responsibility rests in God, he added, stressing, “The highest form of freedom is the freedom to give myself away to God.”
Warning against “sorry freedom” that actually abuses freedom, Shurden urged, “You should be free to do as you ought, not as you wish.”
Moderate Baptists created both the Whitsitt Society and the CBF after fundamentalists cemented their control over the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1990s.
“Something far more valuable than [SBC] institutions was at stake” in the struggle for SBC control, Shurden insisted. “It was the freedom issue that was at stake. To forget that freedom was at stake is a hideous mistake, an enormous tragedy.”
But freedom is “so, so, so much bigger than our Baptist battles,” he said. Baptists should learn from “bigger and more painful” freedom issues, such as those faced by African-American Christians and by Christians the world over who endure injustice and struggle for freedom, he urged.
So Baptists today should champion freedom not just for themselves, Shurden challenged.
“Freedom of conscience is God’s will for the world — more than for Baptists or Christians or Americans,” he said. He called on Baptists to fight for the world’s people to enjoy the freedom to eat, drink pure water, earn a respectable wage, secure medical attention for their children and live in simple dignity.
“Being a Christian means taking seriously what Jesus of Nazareth took seriously,” he said, insisting Jesus did not focus on creeds or institutions or principles, but on the “seeds of freedom.”
“Jesus took freedom seriously,” he said. Jesus’ life and teachings emphasize the freedom to be included and appreciated, to share resources and “live on less,” to love rather than hate and to “anchor your life in and under God’s reign,” he explained.
“It’s much easier to be a Baptist than to take Jesus seriously,” he said. “I never, never, never want moderate Baptists to forget the Baptist ideals of freedom. I want very, very, very much for moderate Baptists to embrace the Jesus ideals of freedom.”
Shurden also affirmed a slate of Baptist principles, which he called “pavement,” and related potential weaknesses, which he termed “potholes.” They include emphases on:
• Personal religious experience of faith, “which is essential for strength,” but which can become spiritual narcissism or “spiritual me-ism.”
• Authority of Scripture, which has shaped Baptist belief and practice, but which can slide into what he termed “slouchy primitivism,” or “the tendency to ignore 2,000 years of Christian history.”
• Believer’s baptism by immersion, which is critical for Baptists’ sense of community, but the belief in the correctness of which can manifest itself as ugly tribalism or an arrogant attitude that Baptists are the only people God can use.
• Local-church autonomy, which can lead to tragic isolationism and a self-righteous attitude that refuses to acknowledge the presence of sincere Christians in other faith communities.
• Freedom of conscience, which, if taken to an extreme, becomes theological relativism. “Freedom of conscience never has meant one idea is as good as another,” but rather that all ideas have the right to be considered and explored, he said.
• Separation of church and state, which promotes free religion in a free state, but which sometimes has been mischaracterized as a kind of extreme secularism that insists religion has no role in the public square.
• Priesthood of all believers, which embraces vital lay leadership, but which sometimes slides into sloppy egalitarianism and weak clergy leadership.
• God’s grace, which is vital for salvation, but which often has been stretched to undercut the importance of Christian discipleship and undermine the need for human effort.
• World missions, which emphasizes personal salvation, but which can result in a truncated understanding of evangelism that ignores human beings’ need for social justice.
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Marv Knox is editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.