Describing Where I Sit

Around here there is a radio talk host who exhorts his callers to “tell me where you sit before you tell me where you stand.” This post is an effort to list my current presuppositions – not all of them, but presuppositions that affect my current posting attitude. A little git of historic descriptive narration makes this more relevant to me than a listing of all the logic and reasoning behind these presuppositions.

I have traveled a long way. When I was a seminary student, I was a flaming conservative. I don't think I quite qualified as a fundamentalist, but I was close. These were they days when the conflict in the SBC were at their height. It was an open question whether the conservatives would win each year during the annual meeting. As a neo-fundamentalist, I truly believed that anyone who denied inerrancy was wrong. When I first went to Southwestern, I held the belief that anyone who did not hold to inerrancy was a liberal. It did not take me long, however, to learn that was not true. I had many conservative, outstanding, Bible believing, God-fearing, scripture loving professors who could not use the term inerrancy. I invented a term for these kind of people: functional inerrantists.

(Whether I actually invented this term or adopted from another I cannot say. I use this term quite a lot without knowing where it comes from. Most of my SWBTS professors fell into this category. Most are today not there anymore. I'm going to borrow some description of SWBTS from MIDDLEKID: "I graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary before the fundamentalists kicked a lot of really good people out. I'm not bitter, but I'm also not naive. I'm proud to have Russell Dilday's signature on my diploma." While SWBTS professors during my time there were functional inerrantists, I believed that must not be true of the other five SBC seminaries. I continued to be "for" the SBC conservatives even as small doubts about them began to arise. As a graduate, I continued to call myself an inerrantist, but had friends and colleagues who were merely functional inerrantists. I saw no functional difference.)

As a pastor, I continued to be a conservative with fundamentalist leanings, though I dialogued with better men than me who held functional inerrancy views. I like to believe that I avoided the posture and attitude of a fundamentalist, but when Baylor changed its charter to protect itself from fundamentalist takeover, I sent a letter to Herb Reynolds saying that despite the education I receieved there I would not recommend sending students from my church there. (I wish I could get that letter back.)

Since leaving the pastorate, I have spent some time serving in churches, but more time as an observer. I confess liking megachurches for the anonymity they provide. They are, like all things evangelical, neither all bad nor all good.

Today, I begin blogging to chronicle my thoughts, to catalog my mixed feelings, and to express myself about some concerns. I have a lot of questions, but few answers. I know there are good people in the SBC, good people in the CBF, good people in the broad evangelical tradition, as well as good people who know and love Christ in mainline churches. Where I fit, I don't know, but I hope I can live out my life in relation to all of the above.

In summary, my presuppositions are:

• Inerrancy does matter, but not so much. A man may have legitimate reservations about the term inerrancy and still treat scripture with high respect. At the same time, I have seen many who claim inerrancy, who speak the right words, and even seek to fight for the concept, but, I have also observed how they fail to exegete scripture with care. Today I pay closer attention to the way a preacher uses scripture than what he says about it.


• There will be a much broader group of people in heaven than I once thought. I still have the duty to share Christ with all (though not the same confrontive way I learned as a young person in soul winning class). Acknowldging this does not move me closer to universalism; I'm just proclaiming my faith in Christ's effectual grace. I still believe all men need to hear the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.


• The SBC is my childhood church. I came to faith in Christ as a child in an SBC church. I attended Sunday School, Church Training, RAs, youth group and nearly all of my childhood friends were made in an SBC church. I learned to share my faith and live my faith as a member. I attended SBC schools. But today I fear the SBC is headed in the wrong direction, and further, I fear it may bring the wider evangelical community down with its brand of fundagelicalism. I still love the SBC, but I am now an outside observer of it. In many ways I am an observer of church in general. Where I used to take places of leadership, today I prefer anonymity. (I suspect further postings on this concept may follow.)


• I never appreciated the concept of Separation of Church and State until I stepped outside of the SBC. As a student I heared James Dunn speak in an ethics class. His reasoning was much more sound than I had been lead to believe (I had been told he was a wacko leftie). I appreciated the Baptist contribution to religious liberty, but saw only small connection to that and the issues of the day. After all, isn't Separation an excuse to secularize society? Today, however, I am comfortable acknowldging and advocating for the historic Baptist position even though that puts me in the same camp with secularists. Possibly the event that confirmed my separation from the SBC was a permanent one was their total defunding of the Baptist Joint Committee (followed by similar action against the Baptist World Alliance).The best safeguard to religious liberty is the Separation of Church and State, and, contrary to evangelical propaganda, Separation is not a threat to evangelicals or a limitation to my personal expression of faith.