Whitsitt Diaries and Immersion

[KeithE]

[Chris]

[William Thornton]

Local church autonomy is a great concept. I'm perfectly OK with you guy's churches accepting infant baptisms, sprinkling, affusion or whatever but I may well vote to disassociatiate from such churches on a state or association level.

[Mark]

Yesterday I came across Carlyle Marney's republished classic, Priests to Each Other. It's been several years since I read it, so I scanned back through its deeply insightful pages. (That's no small task. Marney is a bit more challenging than Joel Osteen. )

Anyway, I stumbled across this excerpt:

"Crawford Toy was fired in 1871 at [Southern Seminary in] Louisville for seeing and saying that religious language was language, too, and must therefore be treated as language. It took six pages of Harvard Faculty Minutes to record their tribute at his death years later...

"Earliest of his compeers to see that religious history is history, too, and must be treated as history, was W. H. Whitsitt. He was exiled from his presidency of Southern Baptist Seminary at Louisville [in] 1901...

"E.Y. Mullins introduced us to psychology and evolution but accepted virtual repudiation in the Memphis Confession [Baptist Faith & Message of 1925] ...

"Brightest light in the world of his generation in terms of social compassion, Walter Rauschenbusch could stomach his Southern compeers for less than a year. Dead, cremated, and scattered over a little Canadian lake, fifty years since his death, he is anathema still to his brothers, except here and there...

"McGlothlen, likely the best historian of Christian thought in the South, who saw our Reformation origins, has been swamped in the sludge of Landmarkism...

"Great in evangelistic concern, John Buchanan [pastor of Southside Baptist Church in Birmingham when it was Alabama's largest and wealthiest congregation], leader in a move to bring Southern Baptists into closer world-church connections [by joining the National/World Council of Churches] was buried under a wave of repudiation...

"I can name more than forty men who represent more than two centuries of graduate study in Europe's best universities, who hold no longer any connection whatever, except nostalgic memory, with the institutions that sired, hired, and fired them. Every seminary and graduate school I know in the North and East has its refugees from among the Baptists in the South. This is our best and only contribution to the world-church. There is no excuse for us..."

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Marney, that's some powerful stuff.

[Chris]

[Ed Pettibone]

[Dave Roberts]

[William Thornton]

Timothy, I am always happy to associate with fellow believers on a personal level and even cooperate on a church level with those who are Christian but differ in some beliefs; hence, my association with the various other clergy in areas where I have served – Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, even American Baptists (well, I haven’t actually been around a real American Baptist where I have served). It is my view that an association of churches that is identified as Baptist should be likeminded in doctrine. We all draw lines. The difference is where we choose to draw them.

Chris, your church would be out. Mine stays in. I would cooperate in many ways with your church, even as my church and I do now with the Methodists, etc.

Dave, we have agreed in the past about the march of associations toward irrelevancy in Baptist life – happy to do so again in this thread. All of the associations I have been in (only three) have had the DOM and secretary as by far its main expenses and I am still looking for some clever SBCer to write that article, “The Southern Baptist Association as a Jobs Program for Middle-Aged and Older, Well-Connected White Baptist Men.” While I don’t have a big problem with the BFM2K, I don’t favor associations adopting it in lockstep to the SBC’s earlier vote.

Mark: The list you provide illustrates a truism one of my profs used to criticize conservatives. He was fond of saying that “a conservative is just a slow liberal.”

[Mark]

[Jonathan]

[Dave Roberts]

[Ed Pettibone]

Ed: Just have to share this from the website of the Pine City Baptist Church near Elmria, NY;

From the E-mail bag:

~ Two Little Boys ~

After a hardy rainstorm filled all the potholes in the streets and alleys, a young mother watched her two little boys playing in the puddle through her kitchen window. The older of the two, a five year old lad, grabbed his sibling by the back of his head and shoved his face into the water hole.
As the boy recovered and stood laughing and dripping, the mother runs to the yard in a panic.
'Why on earth did you do that to your little brother?!' she asks as she shook the older boy in anger.
'We were just playing 'church' mommy, ' he said.
‘And I was just baptizing him.....in the name of the Father, the Son and in...the hole-he-goes!'

[Ed Pettibone]

[Neil Heath]

Somewhere along the way--in a Baptist study course book on associations, I think--I remember reading that the association was the only level in Baptist life that was to be concerned with doctrinal issues. I don't remember why that they said that was so, but it makes sense that any larger group would be too diverse to ever go down that road. That's no longer true. That book represented a time long past. Now many local associations are quite diverse, and the state and national levels are getting into doctrinal issues, possibly an attempt to return to an earlier simpler time, which will never happen.

[Stephen Fox]

Bdid:
Thanks for that post. You may want to contact John Shelley at Furman to get his paper on Professor Cuzzort on the Furman faculty in the 40's for about three years who was progressive on Race and the Inerrancy of Scripture for his time and moved on Up North to an American Baptist School.
Would be a great addition to Marney's list.
Shelley had a great story in the Furman Alum Mag about 7 years ago but I can't find it online.
The Pastor seems like his name was Dean Cates, of Pendleton Street Baptist who was a Furman Trustee and later instrumental in the campus relocation from Downtown to its current location five miles out, was key player in Cuzzort's ouster.