One of the most significant religious developments in the U.S. may be that appearing in the continuing ten-year swing of its largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, toward control by conservatives. The November 4 Christianity Today devoted some 13 pages to “America’s Southern Baptists,” looking at “Who They Are,” “What They Believe” and “Where They Are Going.” In the ongoing struggle in which the conservatives have been gaining increasing control, they have tended to see the main issue as the inerrancy of the Bible. The opposing liberals, who would like to be regarded as “moderates,” are charging that in their efforts to purge from places of power people who deny an inerrant Bible conservatives are betraying the Baptist principles of freedom and the right of private interpretation and are trying to set up a hierarchy.

That issue was dramatically apparent in a little incident some 44 years ago. On entering the U.S. Navy chaplaincy we were given a 6-week indoctrination course at the College of William and Mary, second oldest college in the country, at Williamsburg, Virginia. The first Sunday in that museum-like little village I joined a Southern Baptist colleague in seeking out his church. The sharp–looking young preacher announced to his largely student listeners that his subject was the title of the then-popular song hit, “Don’t Fence Me In.” This phrase he applied as a motto to the Holy Spirit, saying that the Spirit cannot be fenced in by doctrines. “We used to try to keep heretics out of the church; today we welcome them, because the heresy of one generation is the progress of the next.” Thus everyone was welcome. If the Holy Spirit had shown anything to anyone, the minister would not dispute it. This, we were assured, was good Baptist doctrine the “right of private interpretation!” As we were leaving the service, I couldn’t resist expressing to my Texas friend, some disappointment with the minister who seemed to be getting the Lord and the devil mixed up. Almost violently he retorted, “He’s no Southern Baptist. He must have come from the North!”

The real issues in the spiritual battle of the churches have not changed with the passage of years. It is thrilling to see and sometimes hear in Southern Baptist churches a ringing testimony to the Lord’s gospel. But their struggle to maintain or recover it is handicapped by a widespread carelessness about careful teaching of the Bible’s doctrines and in particular of its teachings about the Lord’s order in His Church. To a much greater extent than a half century ago, our churches today suffer from the same loss of Biblical doctrine and church order. (Other churches today sometimes show more appreciation for God’s Word than our own do.) Only if we recover an interest in and join the struggle for that, can we expect a bright future. Isaiah wrote, “To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn” (8:20). Note that that “light” is both present and future.