Amendments to resolution at SBC meeting

[rickwright01]

Got my magic Associated Baptist Press email with news and it included http://www.abpnews.com/www/3228.article:

After much discussion, messengers adopted two amendments. The first, offered by Malcolm Yarnell, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, added to the definition of a New Testament church.

The original included the definition “composed only of those who have been born again by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Word, becoming disciples of Jesus Christ, the local church’s only Lord, by grace through faith.” The amendment added as further definition: “which church practices believers-only baptism by immersion, (Math 28:16-20,) the Lord’s Supper (Matt. 26:26-30) and church discipline (Matt. 18:15-20).

Messengers adopted an amendment by Tom Ascol, prominent in the Calvinist-inspired Founder’s Movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, urging “the churches of the SBC to repent of any failure among us to live up to our professed commitment to regenerate church membership and any failure to obey Jesus Christ in lovingly correcting wayward church members.”

(I hope that's not so much text I am stepping on copyright and such.)

Please - especially excellent conservative brethren/sistren - in no way (yes? what about the senator from Hawaii?) am I criticizing these amendments. My honest reaction to them was not "you gotta be kidding! evil nasty fools!" but simply "okay... what is this about?" I quite understand the concern about "regenerate" membership and discipline. But it sounds like Prof Yarnell (with whose views I have some familiarity) was trying to offer a theologically precise and thorough definition of "regenerate". Is that about right? And more specifically - do we have some notion as to what (a) the impetus was and (b) what the practical effects of this amendment will be? Why this amendment? and what is it supposed to do exactly?

Ascol's amendment did not strike me as weird or anything. Trying to figure out if there is some Calvinism hiding in it - but honestly do not see it. Seems fairly straightforward. "We need to do a better job".

One small observation. Prof Yarnell is not a Calvinist and from what I can tell is rather critical of it. Hard to describe his views in a sentence. My best effort might be "working very hard to promote a pure New Testament ecclesiology/theology" and he is rather sure he has that worked out. No criticism - just trying to understand and describe him fairly.

Addendum - I did visit Baptist Press to see if there was more info. I found the full text of the resolution but not any analysis/explanations. Might have missed it.

Yo con bros - help me out here.

[Gary]

Rick,

This amendment was a lot more about the Baptist Identity movement than with unregenerate membership.

See Dr. Yarnell's essay about this subject on Peter Lumpkins blog: http://peterlumpkins.typepad.com/peter_ ... ent-1.html

My own personal opinion is that it is apparent to some (certainly some of the Baptist Identity folk anyway) that we haven't made the tent small enough yet. Let's keep shrinking!

Gary

[William Thornton]

First, as a resolution, it is only an opinion of those - the few, the patient, the punished - who stuck around for the resolutions.

Second, the calvinists, Tom Ascol most prominently, have been pushing for this at least since before Greensboro, 2006, believing that Southern Baptists should repent of the sins that caused us to report over 16 million church members with only some over six million attending in a given week. Those sins, we are told, must be toleration of an unregenerate church membership, otherwise those Sunday sleepyheads would be sitting in the pews rather than snoozing at home. You can read far more that you ever wanted on this in Ascol's blog.

Third, I think this has less to do with Baptist identity than to the calvinst-propelled movement to reinstitute discipline in churches. Mohler has written on this.

Fourth, as a pastor, I am aware of our membership list and we give attention to it periodically. I'm not too worried about what anyone else might think of it.

Fifth, while I commend the calvinists for drawing attention to this and other matters that indicate faulty soteriology and ecclesiology, I don't think much will change. I do think there is widespread error in some of our SBaptist habits - baptizing preschoolers as young as two or three, manipulative invitations, excessive value placed on baptism statistics, etc.

Aside from what the calvinist bloggers comment about on each other's blogs, I really don't see much happening here.

[Jim]

WT: Second, the calvinists, Tom Ascol most prominently, have been pushing for this at least since before Greensboro, 2006, believing that Southern Baptists should repent of the sins that caused us to report over 16 million church members with only some over six million attending in a given week.

J: According to the 2007 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches of the National Council of Churches, the membership of the Southern Baptist Convention is 17,144,002. So, more repentance is in order than for just a mere 16 million. The SBC has increased by 76% since 1960, while the Mormons have increased by 243 %. Those memberships that have decreased since 1960: United Methodist, 25%; Episcopal, 48%; Presbyterian (USA), 44%; Disciples, 74%; Evangelical Lutheran, 31%. The usual "can't find 'em" anywhere charge is always operative, but that's true all across the board – every denomination.

[rickwright01]

Third, I think this has less to do with Baptist identity than to the calvinst-propelled movement to reinstitute discipline in churches. Mohler has written on this.

I am going to neatly contradict myself. (And split an infinitive.)

I brought this up because I was genuinely... curious? perplexed? and was hoping some (especially our conservative brethren who know better what is going on) would offer some insight. My job is to listen, say thanks, and go "hmm - need to think about that".

Thanks to Gary and especially William for responding so far. The contradiction is that I think I disagree with William - given (1) that Malcolm Yarnell is behind the first amendment and he is definitely not Calvinist and (2) what I already know of him plus the helpful link Gary provides. This seems very much about Baptist Identity - at least from this outsider's perspective. Although William does a great job of explaining how Tom Ascol fits in.

What strikes me about Yarnell is two things. *** Warning! Thread drift! Awoogah! Awoogah *** First - the (for lack of better language) absolute certainty with which he articulates his convictions. He has figured all this out. He is right. It is right there in the Bible. There is no (more) room for disagreement or discussion on these things. Rinse and repeat. (It may not seem so but I say that with respect. The man is vastly more intelligent and better educated than I will ever be. Compared to Yarnell I am a barely literate orangutang. I have heard there are people with earned Ph.D.'s who don't make the cut at Oxford.) I will get back to that.

Second - and this is a criticism - he couches his convictions in terms of "this is about submitting to the Lordship of Christ". So if you disagree with him - you do not disagree with Malcolm Yarnell. You are disobeying God. Jesus is Lord and this is what he said and if you do not do it then... Holding a different from him is not "well I interpret that differently". For example:

Code: Select all

Finally, Baptists do not baptize those who lack the assurance of their eternal salvation, because the doctrine that one may lose one’s salvation indicates a lack of submission to Christ’s own doctrine.

These seven biblical doctrines concerning baptism speak much about Baptist identity. If we compromise these revealed teachings of Christ, we will begin to lose our Baptist identity because we will have compromised the Lordship of Christ. I am a Baptist because I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord. And because I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, I must submit to His will. We may never compromise one aspect of Christ’s will, even in the name of supposed Christian unity.

Notice that if you disagree on some of these matters... it is because you are not "submitting" to the Lordship of Christ. "But I do. I just don't think the Bible is entirely clear on these issues". Ah - but Yarnell tells us the "doctrine of perspicuity" which means the Bible is very clear. (Oh.) "Maybe it is clear but it does not provide us all the information we need". Apparently there is a "doctrine of sufficiency" (no argument from me) but which applies to... well all of these questions. And so on and so on. The Bible gives us all the info we need. It is perfectly clear. It is a written expression of the will therefore Lordship of Christ. If you disagree or act differently...

"I am a Baptist because I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord". Notice the language used. So others are not Baptist because... because... they implicitly do not believe Jesus is Lord.

(Of course if Prof Yarnell is correct on all of these - my "criticisms" are irrelevant.)

My ill informed guess is that Malcolm Yarnell and I share a similar struggle. We are sick and tired of the vagueness and "well whatever feels good at the moment" that we perceive (notice my language) seems common among Baptists of all stripes. (Recall some of my more melodramatic comments from the whole "conciliar Christianity/church fathers" thread a while back.) I have been trying to harden the jello by looking more toward the early Church. Malcolm Yarnell seems to choose a different route - one that is "purely New Testament". Just thinking out loud here.

When people make a big deal out of something (wrong or right) I ask, "Why? Why do you care so much? What motivates all this?"

[Jim]

Dr. Yarnell and his seven doctrines concerning baptism are just that – his doctrines, as he reads a lot of stuff into the practice that isn't there scripturally, except as defined by him, of course. Philip most likely didn't have the authority of any local church to baptize the eunuch, for instance. In fact, was Philip even ordained? Even though Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, in Luke 12 he said he had another baptism to undergo. What was it? Yarnell didn't say. John the Baptist insisted, as recorded in all the gospels, that he baptized unto repentance, but that Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit. What did that mean? Yarnell uses Matt.28:19 as how and where to baptize. The TEV mentions all peoples, but other translations, as well as the original Greek, apparently, seem to have the nations as the objects of baptisms. Which baptism did Jesus mean – water baptism or the baptism of the Holy Spirit? The latter would seem to be the case since nations could hardly be water-baptized.

Yarnell probably would agree with the Baptism Article in the Abstract of Principles, the Southern Seminary document upon which all professors must place their imprimatur in order to teach:

BAPTISM. Baptism is an ordinance of the Lord Jesus, obligatory upon every believer, wherein he is immersed in water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, as a sign of his fellowship with the death and resurrection of Christ, of remission of sins, and of his giving himself up to God, to live and walk in newness of life. It is a prerequisite to church fellowship, and to participation in the Lord's Supper.

Baptism is an ordinance of the church. It is not obligatory upon every believer, since neither the thief on the cross, the infirm, nor deathbed confessors could or can satisfy this requirement. It is not a sign of fellowship with the death and resurrection of Christ, but simply a sign of fellowship with Christ, who was also baptized long before the death and resurrection. From a grammatical standpoint, one can fellowship with people, but not with abstractions or impersonal entities, such as death and resurrection. Words are important. If baptism is a prerequisite to church fellowship, no sinner would be welcome in church. Perhaps the Abstract authors meant church membership (local, that is). With regard to baptism as a prerequisite to participation in the Lord's Supper, who knows what Christ would say? He just said to observe the Supper in remembrance of Him.

For too long, the teaching consensus regarding Christ's baptism has centered on the notion that Christ was simply identifying somehow with all who would be baptized, sharing in their symbolic act depicting the washing of sin, etc. Jesus, sinless and thus in no need of depicting a cleansing, would have been hypocritical in accepting baptism for such reason(s). John's baptism was one of repentance only. For Him even to depict the death, burial and resurrection accruing to the passion would have been in error, since those things had not yet happened. Christ's baptism could only have been understood at the time in light of the ministry of John the Baptist concerning baptism; therefore, sinless as Christ was, He would have been wrong to undergo it under John's terms. The focal point of Christ's baptism, then, was not Christ, but God, in His endorsement of the baptism. Born and killed under the law, Christ rose unto grace, thus fulfilling His affirmation that He came not to destroy, but to fulfill, the law. Christ's baptism synthesized law into grace, and was the proper foreshadowing symbol of Christ's ministry and God's plan for redemption. To claim that Christ was being a good role model in being baptized is ludicrous.

[Dave Roberts]

Maybe the problem among all stripes of Baptists is that we haven't been busy reading the Great Commission. It doesn't say "gain members who are baptized." It says, "Disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you." Have we been so busy counting that we failed to follow the imperative?

[rickwright01]

Maybe the problem among all stripes of Baptists is that we haven't been busy reading the Great Commission. It doesn't say "gain members who are baptized." It says, "Disciple all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I have commanded you." Have we been so busy counting that we failed to follow the imperative?

This observation would actually strengthen the approach taken (for example) Prof Yarnell. See David Bosch, Transforming Mission who in his chapter on "Matthew and Missions as Disciple-Making" explains brilliantly that too often we take Matthew 28:16-20 out of the context of the entire book of Matthew. The Great Commission is rooted in the entire gospel. If we do that... then the Commission is not just about "getting people to believe in Jesus" but "helping them be what the apostles are... which is be/doing/saying what Jesus is/does/says.. the heart of which (at least in Matthew) is doing the will of God". The Great Commission is implicitly as much about doing as it is about believing. And this Jesus the Master Teacher/Interpreter of Torah is also Lord.

What that has to do with "Baptist Identity"...

The "baptizing them" part might actually undermine Yarnell's emphasis on "first regeneration then baptism". The New Testament does not always seem to reflect that typically Baptist analysis. Especially the book of Acts where the whole faith/baptism/Spirit complex comes in a whole slew of combinations. I believe it was Rudolph Schnackenburg who wrote, "{Acts} shows that God can handle all the exigencies of life".

[Jonathan]

I rarely pay attention to SBC resolutions anymore (unless, fellow baptist polity geeks, I'm actually registered as a messenger). Conservative "discovered" back in the 60s and 70s that resolution time is a time for folks to speak to a large crowd and make demands that have no authority beyond 2-3 days that the annual meeting lasts. In essence, resolution time is the SBC equivalent of "special order" speeches in the US House of Representative. What is said gets entered into the official record but no one is bound by an affirmative vote.

This is why Yarnell's resolution is somewhat puzzling to me. Since he had to know that it would have no authority on an SBC agency (much less an autonomous SBC church), why put so much prep work and passion into it? Perhaps, he is using this platform to lay the groundwork for the next BFM revision where his views can be added to the doctrinal boundary for all SBC agencies.

As much as several of his points resonate with me, anyone who wanted to force such reform on the churches in a short period of time would be running into a buzzsaw. SBC/local church politics are not completely unlike national/state/local secular politics: folks may rail against what is happening around the nation but tend to vote in approval of their local leadership. The same folks who decry the embarrassment of SBC claiming over 17million church members where less than 10million actually attend services (and half of that in attendance in Sunday School) are likely to attend a church that has twice the number of resident members as folks who actually attend, work, and give but are loath to clean up the rolls for fear of the backlash.

Church discipline has been dormant in the mainstream of SBC church life for around 90 years. It will take much more than a Yarnell resolution to resurrect it. The conservative resurrgence was a much easier sell to the churches than this will be (there is nothing in the current decade that is comparable to a Kenneth Chafin/Phil Donahue tape to distill the issue in a few minutes for the purposes of mobilization).

[Ed Pettibone]

Jonathan writes in part "Church discipline has been dormant in the mainstream of SBC church life for around 90 years. It will take much more than a Yarnell resolution to resurrect it."

Ed: Jonathan I am hesitant to enter this this discussion since I will be out of pocket most of the next week and a half, attending the CBF assembly and Visiting our kids in Missouri. I disagree howeve with your statement above. After I became a Southern Baptist in 1956 I had a number of opportunities to observe the practice of Church Discipline, done both very well and very poorly over several years. I will admit it does seem to have gotten lost in the - side taking - since 1979. Although I still here some reports of it Un fortunately few SBC churches have had the leadership to to keep the process Christ Centered and Baptist polity tends to sour the mix.

[Big Daddy Weaver]

Rick,

From reading your Anglican-related blog posts, I thought you'd be interested in knowing (if you didn't already) that one of Yarnell's dissertation readers at Oxford was Rowan Williams.

Both men couldn't be further apart from one another theologically.

After the Takeover, Barry Hankins wrote Uneasy in Babylon and basically argued that "Southern Baptist conservatives" were discovering their place in mainstream evangelicalism thanks to men like Carl F. Henry and Francis Schaeffer. However, I think Yarnell represents an intellectual breed of Baptist fundamentalists (and I don't use this pejoratively) that has done exactly the opposite of what Hankins argued and has rejected mainstream conservative evangelicalism for a form of isolationist fundamentalism painted in a Landmark-esque color.

[Tom Butler]

[
What strikes me about Yarnell is two things. *** Warning! Thread drift! Awoogah! Awoogah *** First - the (for lack of better language) absolute certainty with which he articulates his convictions. He has figured all this out. He is right. It is right there in the Bible. There is no (more) room for disagreement or discussion on these things.

I'm confused. Dr. Yarnell is certain that his convictions are correct, and that's bad?

I'm certainly willing to hear other viewpoints, but that latitude doesn't lessen my certainty about some things.

[Tom Butler]

I was reading about a mega-church in the SBC, which claims about 30,000 members. It averages about 10,000 in attendance on Sunday. Isn't there something wrong \with this picture? Should not such efforts to deal with that problem be applauded rather than ridiculed?

Some of you have the mindset that if the SBC does it, there must be a secret sinister motive, because everything the SBC does is bad, bad, bad. What is Dr. Yarnell REALLY up to? And Tom Ascol? Why he's a Calvinist! He's certainly up to no good.

[William Thornton]

I was reading about a mega-church in the SBC, which claims about 30,000 members. It averages about 10,000 in attendance on Sunday. Isn't there something wrong \with this picture? Should not such efforts to deal with that problem be applauded rather than ridiculed?

Some of you have the mindset that if the SBC does it, there must be a secret sinister motive, because everything the SBC does is bad, bad, bad. What is Dr. Yarnell REALLY up to? And Tom Ascol? Why he's a Calvinist! He's certainly up to no good.

I don't know that ANY resolution pushed by a handful of passionate advocates and passed by a small group of baptists at one of our meetings is worth much at all. Perhaps it raises the visibility of membership statistics. Perhaps it encourages a few pastors to attempt to tidy up their membership rolls. If the 'baptist identity' movement folks ('landmarkists' to some of their critics) and the calvinist hardliners unite, and that is what seemed to happen here, I still don't know if anything important happened.

Playing off what the mod/libs said about the New Baptist Covenant: "A moment, not a movement."

[Ed Pettibone]

I was reading about a mega-church in the SBC, which claims about 30,000 members. It averages about 10,000 in attendance on Sunday. Isn't there something wrong \with this picture? Should not such efforts to deal with that problem be applauded rather than ridiculed?

Some of you have the mindset that if the SBC does it, there must be a secret sinister motive, because everything the SBC does is bad, bad, bad. What is Dr. Yarnell REALLY up to? And Tom Ascol? Why he's a Calvinist! He's certainly up to no good.

I don't know that ANY resolution pushed by a handful of passionate advocates and passed by a small group of baptists at one of our meetings is worth much at all. Perhaps it raises the visibility of membership statistics. Perhaps it encourages a few pastors to attempt to tidy up their membership rolls. If the 'baptist identity' movement folks ('landmarkists' to some of their critics) and the Calvinist hardliners unite, and that is what seemed to happen here, I still don't know if anything important happened.

Playing off what the mod/libs said about the New Baptist Covenant: "A moment, not a movement."

Ed: In that last sentence William you may be confusing what Mod/libs said about the New Baptist Covenant Celebration held in Atlanta and what we have said about the Covenant. I have heard no one involved with the Covenant who has not acknowledged it
as a "movement" to encourage and enable Baptist of all stripes to discover ways to partner together in accomplishing God's will What it is not, is a "movement" to bring all baptist entities into one supper organization with new layers of responsibility.

Alas, I have no Idea when I will get back to this subject, as I have a number of small task to take care of before. Leaving for Memphis at 6:00 A.M..