What is a Southern Baptist? And who decides? If we were to boil down the current debate around confessionalism in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), I think we would get close to the heart of the issue with these two questions. In other words, the question about confessionalism in the SBC involves questions about identity and association.
In our pursuit to answer these questions about identity and association, we can begin by negation: What does not make one a Southern Baptist? One is not a Southern Baptist merely because he grew up Southern Baptist. Baptists of all people know that Baptist identity is not simply generational. Baptist identity is built on believer’s baptism and regenerate church membership. God does not have any grandchildren, and neither does the Southern Baptist Convention. Prominent exits from the SBC over the past few years should also remind us of the inherent instability of the “once a Southern Baptist, always a Southern Baptist” approach. If one leaves the SBC, he is no longer a Southern Baptist in any meaningful sense. But what else does not make one a Southern Baptist? Having a relative who holds a prominent leadership position in the SBC; being politically invested in the future of America’s largest Protestant denomination and biggest evangelical voting bloc; or wanting access to NAMB church-planting dollars. None of these identity markers makes one a Southern Baptist.
So what is a Southern Baptist? Fundamentally, Southern Baptist identity is related to Baptist identity, and Baptist identity is tied to regenerate membership in a local Baptist church. This means that the question of Southern Baptist identity is directly related to the question of what a Southern Baptist church is. For instance, I did not grow up in a Southern Baptist church, but I am a Southern Baptist today because I am currently a member of a Southern Baptist church.
Then what is a Southern Baptist church? Sometimes, the way the current debate around confessionalism in the SBC has unfolded, it seems there are those in the SBC for whom Southern Baptist identity is purely a matter of free association: If a church says they are Southern Baptist, who are we to say they are not? If a church wants to give money to the cooperative program and is willing to associate with the convention, then why can’t that church be considered a Southern Baptist church?
Not a Freelance Club
This attitude of freewheeling association is one E. Y. Mullins (1860–1928) confronted when he was involved in introducing the first denomination-wide confession, the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message, into Southern Baptist life. Mullins wrote his seminal article, “The Baptist Denomination is not a Free Lance Club” in defense of adopting and abiding by this confession in the SBC.[1]
1. E.Y. Mullins, “The Baptist denomination is not a free lance club,” Baptist Press, posted September 12, 2002, https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/first-person-the-baptist-denomination-is-not-a-free-lance-club/.
Recently, especially related to questions around women pastors, there are those who seem more prone to treat the SBC as a “free lance club,” to use Mullins’s phrase. But the untenability of such a position is laid bare on closer inspection, especially related to other issues many of these same people are rightly concerned about. For example, if a church hires a known sexual abuser, or a church practices racist policies, should they be allowed to continue associating in good standing with the SBC? As recent actions at our annual meetings have shown, actions that have included changes to the SBC constitution, our convention of churches reserves the right to regulate its own makeup and association, which involves matters of identity. We do not want to be ecclesially associated with racists or sexual abusers, and we do not want racists or sexual abusers to be able to lay credible claim to a Southern Baptist identity. This is a matter of regulating our association, which is exactly what Mullins addressed in his article:
Baptists have always insisted upon their own right to declare their beliefs in a definite, formal way, and to protect themselves by refusing to support men in important places as teachers and preachers who do not agree with them. This group right of self-protection is as sacred as any individual right. If a group of men known as Baptists consider themselves trustees of certain great truths, they have an inalienable right to conserve and propagate those truths unmolested by others in the denomination who oppose those truths. The latter have an equal right to unite with another group agreeing with them. But they have no right to attempt to make of the Baptist denomination a free lance club.
For reasons outlined above, I think all Southern Baptists should be able to agree that we do not want the SBC to be a “free lance club.” If not “free lance,” then what should determine the parameters of membership in the “club”? Again, if Southern Baptist identity is related to Southern Baptist association—a Southern Baptist is nothing more or less than a member of a Southern Baptist church—then what should be the terms of SBC association? Who or what determines what a Southern Baptist church is?
Historically, Baptists have answered the question of association with confessions. From the very beginning and in line with the rest of Christian orthodoxy, Baptists have used confessions to define the faith and practice held in common between a group of associated Baptists. In other words, confessions help define the baseline beliefs of Baptists and allow Baptist churches to identify and associate with other Baptist churches of like faith and practice. From the First and Second London Baptist Confessions of Faith (1646 & 1689) to the New Hampshire Confession (1833) to the Baptist Faith and Message (1925, 1963, 2000), Baptists have used confessions to inform and regulate Baptist faith and practice. In fact, this is the language that is explicitly used in the Preamble to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message:
Baptist churches, associations, and general bodies have adopted confessions of faith as a witness to the world, and as instruments of doctrinal accountability. We are not embarrassed to state before the world that these are doctrines we hold precious and as essential to the Baptist tradition of faith and practice.[2]
2. The Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee, “Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee to the Southern Baptist Convention,” SBC.net, June 14, 2000, https://bfm.sbc.net/preamble/.
Note carefully the words “precious” and “essential.” In this way, confessions are meant to both shape and reflect Baptist identity and association. It is true that the 2000 Preamble, quoting language from both the 1925 and 1963 Preambles, acknowledges that “Confessions are only guides in interpretation, having no authority over the conscience,” a statement often cited by recent critics of confessionalism in the SBC. But the 2000 Preamble also states—again, quoting language from the 1925 and 1963 Preambles—that confessions are “for the general instruction and guidance of our own people and others concerning those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us.” Confessions are not meant to railroad consciences or coerce belief—indeed, they have no power to do so. But they are certainly intended to influence, to instruct, to guide, and, to return to the Preamble quoted above, to be used as “instruments of doctrinal accountability”—accountability related to identity and association.
Confessionalism or Downgrade
Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) faced a vacuum of confessionalism in his own Baptist Union denomination during the infamous Downgrade Controversy beginning in 1887.[3] Spurgeon rightly identified the extremely minimalist doctrinal approach to association and cooperation in the Baptist Union as one of the chief challenges he faced during the Downgrade conflict. At the time, membership in the Baptist Union was solely based around the belief that “the immersion of believers is the only Christian baptism.” This led Spurgeon to refer to the Baptist Union as less “an assemblage of evangelical churches” and more “an indiscriminate collection of communities practicing immersion.”[4]
3. For further study, see “The Downgrade Conflict” in Tom Nettles, Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2013), 541–578.
4. Tom Nettles, Living By Revealed Truth, 557.
Because of their bare-bones approach to association, Spurgeon knew that the Baptist Union was ill-equipped to combat the host of theological and practical issues they were facing. Churches in the Baptist Union were, among other things, rejecting the inerrancy and authority of Scripture and embracing Darwinistic naturalism—some of the very same issues the SBC faced decades later and addressed in the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message. In response, Spurgeon urged a more robust confessionalism as the basis of their associational unity, but the Union did not listen. So Spurgeon led his church to withdraw. In a letter to an inquiring pastor in Louisville, Spurgeon defended their withdrawal:
Essentially, there is no doctrinal basis to begin with and many believe this to be a great beauty. ‘Down with all creeds’ seems to be the watchword. Protests failing, I left; and this has caused more enquiry than a thousand papers would have done. I do not see what I could have done else. Others might not be under such a compulsion till they have tried to mend matters and have failed as I have done. With no confession of faith, or avowal of principles, there’s nothing to work upon; and I do not see the use of repairing a house that is built on the air.[5]
5. Tom Nettles, Living By Revealed Truth, 556.
Confessions are necessary to the work of cooperation because they provide a framework for both identity and association. Without prior agreed upon principles, or absent an articulated faith and practice in common, every Baptist meeting would necessarily have to begin with declarations, avowals and disavowals, and faith confessions. Some look on our current convention meetings and may wonder if we are not already there, but imagine if nothing could be assumed, and you can understand Spurgeon’s frustration. With nothing to work upon, there is no work to be done.
From Confessionalism to the SBC’s Current Confession
If I have persuaded you so far that some kind of confessionalism is not only faithful to Baptist history, but necessary for Baptist identity and association, then we are now ready to see how a more robust confessionalism could and should inform our life together as SBC churches in relation to our current Southern Baptist confession of faith.
Thankfully, we are not in the same situation that Spurgeon faced in 1887 or that Mullins faced in 1920. We not only have a faithful confession, but we have a faithful theological tradition of confessions upon which our current one is self-consciously based. We should count our blessings.
So how should our confession of faith regulate Southern Baptist identity and association? When asked a similar question in a recent forum on The State of the SBC, Dr. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, observed that there are essentially three ways to answer this question:
- Either every word of the confession is important;
- some words of the confession are important; or
- no words of the confession are important.
To take the last answer first, to treat no words of the confession as important is to functionally operate without a confession or any doctrinal basis for cooperation, which would put us in a worse position than the Baptist Union during Spurgeon’s day. The good news is there do not seem to be any prominent critics of confessionalism in the SBC today who have articulated this approach, even if they have sometimes exhibited rank inconsistency in their opposition. Obviously, even to use the term Southern Baptist is to lay claim to some identity that distinguishes us from other confessions or identities: we are not Latter Day Saints because of our Christology; we are not Roman Catholics because of our soteriology; we are not Presbyterians because of our ecclesiology—each one of these positions is doctrinally articulated in our current confession of faith.
So the choice before us with respect to confessionalism in the SBC, as Dr. Mohler helpfully put it, is between the import of “all” or “some” of the words in our confession. Which brings us to the much-debated phrase, “closely identified.” Article III of the SBC constitution regulates the “Composition” of the Southern Baptist Convention by defining which churches will be deemed in “friendly cooperation” with the convention, meaning they can rightfully lay claim to the identity of and be associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which includes being able to seat messengers at the annual meeting. Among other criteria, a church so recognized by the SBC has “a faith and practice which closely identifies with the Convention’s adopted statement of faith.”
Some are approaching the question of confessionalism in the SBC as if the language “closely identifies with” supports a position that only some words of the confession are important. At this point, it is a matter of ratios and percentages. How many words? Which ones? For instance, on the question of women pastors in the SBC, even though the current Baptist Faith and Message clearly states that the “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” if a church can ascribe to the rest of the confession in their faith and practice, but only contradict it at this point, then the SBC may consider that church still closely identified with the confession. Some of the words of the confession are important, but not all. But which ones? And who determines this? If a Presbyterian congregation can ascribe to every jot and tittle of our confession, except for a few words here and there regarding our theology of baptism and membership, can they be considered “closely identified”? Why or why not?
It is here that I think it would be good for us all to be reminded where the language “closely identified with” first originated. It was not in the SBC Constitution, which was changed to include this phrase only in 2015. No, this language first appeared in official SBC life in the Preamble to the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, and it wasn’t to make room for divergence, but the opposite: to define our common doctrinal commitments. In other words, “closely identified” was first used to define SBC identity and association:
Baptists emphasize the soul’s competency before God, freedom in religion, and the priesthood of the believer. However, this emphasis should not be interpreted to mean that there is an absence of certain definite doctrines that Baptists believe, cherish, and with which they have been and are now closely identified. (emphasis added).[6]
6. “Comparison Chart,” SBC, accessed May 15, 2024, https://bfm.sbc.net/comparison-chart/.
Don’t miss this: the phrase “closely identified” was first meant as a definition of historic and contemporary Southern Baptist faith and practice, not as a measure for how far one can diverge from such and still be considered Southern Baptist. Insofar as we can return to this understanding of this phrase—which should be seen more as a synonym for non-contradiction than acceptable deviation—we will return to the spirit of our rich history of confessionalism in the SBC. As articulated by the 1963 Preamble and reaffirmed in the 2000 Preamble of the Baptist Faith and Message:
Thus this generation of Southern Baptists is in historic succession of intent and purpose as it endeavors to state for its time and theological climate those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us.
This is the purpose of our confession: to set forth and to guard what is “surely held among us.” In this way, every word of the confession is important.
What is the alternative? If only some of the words are important, as some seem to want in the SBC, then these “important words” are the ones that will be the de facto confession that regulates Southern Baptist identity and association. But who will know which ones?
As Carl Trueman has argued, everyone lives by a creed or confession, even those who say they do not.[7] These creeds and confessions are either written down, or they are not. But everyone has one. Even those who want to move the SBC away from non-contradiction with respect to women pastors and the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message are not wanting less confessionalism at this point, they just want a different confessionalism. They want a confessionalism that says, whether written down and voted on or not, the issue of women pastors is one that Southern Baptists can agree to disagree on. Do not be mistaken: this is confessionalism—just of a different stripe than the one millions of Southern Baptists have already approved and agreed to abide by in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.
7. Carl Trueman, “Why Christians Need Confessions,” The OPC.
Southern Baptist Identity and Association through Confession
Let us return now to our initial question. What is a Southern Baptist? A Southern Baptist is a member of a Southern Baptist church; and a Southern Baptist church is a church whose faith and practice, identity and association, are defined by our Southern Baptist confession of faith and acknowledged as such by her sister churches in friendly cooperation. We should be thankful for our confession and embrace it in full, because like its predecessors, it functions as all Baptist confessions have, as Mullins reminds us, “to define certain great limits within which a man is entitled to call himself a Baptist. [Confessions] have the immense practical value of indicating who can work together successfully in the enterprises of the kingdom of God.”[8]
8. Mullins, “The Baptist Denomination is Not a Free Lance Club.”
Without confessionalism, we cannot have confident cooperation. Because as Mullins warned, “No man can with enthusiasm give his money or his assistance in propagating what he regards as fundamental error.” Error does not breed unity and cooperation. Truth does. And we should joyfully commit to continue to confess the truth together, as Southern Baptists.
