What Harold Lindsell aptly called “the battle for the Bible” continues on many fronts. Preoccupied as many of us are tempted to be with its ominous developments among our own churches, we need from time to time to look around us to see how the same struggle for the Christian Faith is faring, often on a much larger scale, in other families of churches. Making a deliberate effort to do that may help us to better understand the struggle as we are involved in it and to appreciate its meaning in the larger framework of the Lord’s continuing work with His church.
Apparent Conservative Successes
Since Dr. Lindsell wrote his book that battle has intensified especially in his own denomination, the largest in the United States (reportedly about 50 times the size of our CRC), the Southern Baptist Convention. James C. Hefly, writing in the August 5, 1983 Christianity Today surveyed the development of that struggle. He called attention to the way in which U.S. Protestant churches uniformly “drift to the left” as they lose their faith in the Bible’s authority under the influence of Bible criticism. Since 1979 Southern Baptist conservatives have been organizing to resist this slide into unbelief, and have seemed to begin to tum back the huge, fourteen million member, denomination toward its historic Faith.
In 1961 Ralph Elliot’s commentary on Genesis which “forthrightly said that Genesis 1–11 was not factual history” stirred up a storm which resulted in the firing of the author from the seminary. In the struggles that followed conservatives elected three successive presidents who began to shift the churches’ leadership back toward conservatism. This could be done because of the president’s power to name the Committee on Committees, which nominated the Committee on Boards, which nominated the trustees who hired administrators of the schools and agencies. Paul Pressler, a judge and conservative leader, cited some reasons for conservative successes. They started early, tried to work within the system, sought to place conservative trustees in strategic places and, while avoiding personal attacks, they called attention to what Liberals were teaching. He recognized that conservatives still had a long way to go in their struggle.
Entrenched Liberalism
Recent reports have highlighted another side to these ostensible conservative successes. In the May 27, 1985, Christian News M.H. Reynolds, the editor of Foundation magazine, is quoted as observing that, although at the conventions “for six years in a row conservative presidents have been elected” and conservatives have claimed “victory,” how many theological liberals have lost their jobs? None, so far as we can determine. Thus, while conservatives have been busy boasting of their victories, several thousand students have continued to receive a liberal brainwashing each year and liberals in key positions on boards, agencies and publications have been permitted to continue their indoctrination of fourteen million southern Baptists with liberal theology and programs. Thus, conservatism in the SBC has actually lost ground in spite of apparent “victories,” as “most of the seventy southern Baptist colleges and six seminaries are either firmly in the Liberal camp or are trying to maintain a position of neutrality.”
In the May 27 Christian News Rev. Bob Mowrey of Nashville is quoted as he calls attention to the conscience problem of conservatives in financially supporting the denomination. “Do you wonder why some of our more evangelistic pastors fmd it difficult to give wholehearted support to the Cooperative Program? Is it because we want to be independent and do not love our denomination? Is it because we do not believe in missions? No! It‘s because we find it binding on our consciences to pay the salaries of many men who are tearing down what we believe about the Word of God. Far more of the Cooperative Program dollar goes to our colleges and seminaries than goes to the foreign mission field. For that reason some of us . . . are asking that some of our schools and seminaries be deleted from our support. This enables us to give wholehearted support to so many people in our denomination whom we love and have confidence in, and, at the same time, not to feel that we are financing our own self-destruction.
Conservative Loss by Compromise
The May 13, 1985 Christian News calls attention to a new book by Dr. David 0. Beale, S.B.C. House on the Sand ? Critical Issues for Southern Baptists. In its last chapter entitled, “Will the Convention Change or Split?” this church historian concludes, “Although . . . conservatives have discovered the presence of the malignant cancer of apostasy in the body, they have refused a complete diagnosis and removal of the cancer until it is now terminal.” “At best, contemporary conservatives are officially expressing only a desire that truth receive a hearing alongside error.” “Time, therefore is on the Liberals’ side.” The author advised loyal Christians to leave the denomination, as two or three churches each week are doing. “The cancer has permeated every area of the body, and no Bible believer should continue to feed it.”
The loose convention structure of the denomination makes it difficult to take decisive action. While the Convention still officially opposes women’s ordination, its churches now have an estimated over 250 ordained women, at least thirteen of whom serve as pastors, and liberal seminary professors continue to advocate that and continue to attack the inerrancy of the Bible, which explicitly forbids it.
The June 10–13 Dallas Convention threatens to be a crisis as liberals become more militant in publicly challenging recent conservative leadership. Their strategy seems to be to support a conservative candidate who will compromise and promote the financial Cooperative Program, in an effort to oust the current conservative president.