Rebuke for Demonizing SBC Moderates

And yet it needed to be done.

Schadenfreude is a frequent danger.

 

Actually, it didn't need to be done at all. However, Lloyd Elder was not one of the insiders for the "Conservative Resurgence" and it was a choice position for one of the "winners" in the battle for the Convention. So there were a lot of issues raised with Elder's leadership to make him want to retire.

At the time, the Sunday School Board was under fire for a history of the Sunday School Board written by Leon McBeth, a prominent Baptist historian. Trustees reviewed the manuscript and reportedly claimed it was biased against the "Conservative Resurgence," so they killed the book, retaining copyright so that it could not be published anywhere.

That charge was false, because the text of the book didn't have that much to say about the period between 1970-1990 in regard to Convention politics, and what was mentioned was all carefully documented and common knowledge to people who kept up with the news. I know this first-hand, since I have read a hand-stitched galley proof of the book, sent to the author, Dr. McBeth, for final review and marking of typos or layout issues. There is a copy of the book in the Texas Baptist Historical Collection, as well as at least one copy in the hands of his family (he and his family were members of my church).

 

I was speaking of the resurgence in general, not that particular battle.

You can't wait until your schools have turned into a Union Theological Seminary or Harvard Divinity School before you move to make changes. Or the turmoil that Rogers rightly saw as unworthy of celebration would be so much greater.

 

Maybe I am unaware, but what generally does an SBC moderate believe? How would it match up with evangelical mainliners, who are generally liberal theologically but conservative on moral issues such as homosexuality and abortion?

 

Most of the time, an SBC moderate believed essentially the same things that the "conservatives" believed, but they were not in sympathy with the Patterson/Pressler coalition who used political scheming and what was perceived as outright dishonesty to gain power.

As someone who assumed that there was a huge problem in the Convention when I first became involved in the mid-1980s, I moved from being a "conservative" to a "moderate" after unintentionally getting pulled into some backroom strategy meetings and hearing lies told about people I knew personally. Those persons were then dishonestly attacked and vilified. Because of basic Christian teaching, I could not go along with it. When I stopped going along with it, I ended up on the receiving end of the assaults, with people claiming that I "didn't believe the Bible" because I did not subscribe to the political movement that they did.

Were there some liberals in the convention in teaching positions? Yes, a few. Did it require burning down decades of good will and cooperation to remove the few liberals and even more people who were falsely accused of being liberals to make corrections to the convention institutions? Nope.

When I was in college, we had a professor in the School of Christianity who was a theological liberal among the rest of the theology faculty. I actually found it quite valuable to have him around during the formative part of my early theological training. He demonstrated the epistemological failures of liberalism, as well as the powerlessness of a faith that was always trying to find rational excuses for acts of God. It was also good training for my peers to learn to think for themselves. Since there was not a completely united front on theological/historical issues, students had to take seriously challenges to our beliefs and work that out early instead of in the pastorate.

 

Do not believe, for even a second, the garbage slander being expelled by BB about Patterson and Pressler. The libbies in the convention accused them of all kinds of heinous stuff and as we see with BB they seem to not have gotten over it yet.

The so called moderates (who are really liberals) were largely in our seminaries teaching heresies like the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not narrative, the Bible is as much a human work as it is a God work and would use that as an excuse to use tactics like critical theory on scripture, they often will avoid supernatural explanations of far too many things in scripture. Pressler did a study which took several years and what he found was that our young men were going into our seminaries believing in the bible but leaving our seminaries with little trust in scripture. I could go on but that is the general idea.

For a good read on this matter you might order the book "A Hill on which to die" by Paul Pressler. He tells the story almost play by play and then some.

 

It sounds like the moderates believed in similar stuff to moderate seminaries like Asbury Theological Seminary then. Thank you for the warning.

 

"Because of the opprobrious epithet "liberal," today they call themselves "moderates." A skunk by any other name still stinks!" ~ W.A. Criswell

 

There are at least two sides to every story. Revmitchell does not want you to hear a side that does not conform to his beliefs.

As you can see, Revmitchell much immediately resort to name-calling ("libbies") and assert that I am one of them and have "not gotten over it yet." Quite typical for him. This is how Patterson and Pressler operated. They would claim liberalism without evidence, and any protests to the contrary were portrayed as evidence that the charges were true. Now watch him employ this technique in the next sentence:

He repeats the charge, asserting that one cannot really be a moderate, only a liberal in disguise. He tells it like he is revealing truth, but he is actually lying to you.

These were clever charges distributed to persons in the pew who don't know much about theology or theological education. For instance, Patterson and company knew that if someone in the pew heard that they were teaching "Textual Criticism" in the seminaries, they must certainly be criticizing the Bible! Of course, textual criticism is nothing of the sort. Many times these charges were vague, but Patterson assured people throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s that he had a "Heresy File" chock-full of liberal seminary professors. In the mid-1980s, Paul Powell, President of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, challenged Patterson to allow him to review the file. Powell found a total of eight men in the file, three of whom were retired. Many of the charges were overblown, but at most, the liberals in the SBC seminaries "could fit in a Volkswagen."

I think he is referring here to a master's thesis written by a seminary student, Noel Wesley Hollyfield, Jr., which was touted by the Patterson/Pressler coalition as definitive proof that students were losing their faith. I have read the unpublished thesis (there is a copy at Southwestern Seminary's library) and it seems to have some fundamental issues in terms of methodology. Moreover, the way the results are often interpreted seem to confuse dogmatism with faith.

Have there been issues with Baptist institutions harming people's faith? Sure. Sometimes students come into a Baptist school with a faith built on their church pastor's faulty teaching, and when they are confronted with sound doctrine, they face a crisis and decided that it is all a lie instead of realizing that the pastor they revered may not have all of his facts straight. Moreover, most of us who have gone off to school for theological training have been warned by well-intentioned people that the "liberals" are going to destroy their faith. When the student faces challenges or realizes that they did not have some things quite right, they feel like perhaps they have been completely misled.

Speaking for myself, my childhood faith fell apart quite quickly when I was first exposed to atheism from a close family member. After a five-minute conversation, I was agnostic who was quite open to considering atheism as my new belief system. The church I grew up in set me up for my faith to fall apart, although that was not their intent. Fortunately, I didn't tell anyone at church that I was agnostic and began to secretly figure things out for myself. If I had told anyone at church what I was doing, I would have been hounded by well-meaning Christians to the destruction of trust in Christian teaching, just like that family member. After Jesus had finished drawing me back to Himself with a new understanding of the faith, When I surrendered to a call to prepare for ministry and went off to school, the school tested us on our religious perspectives and level of dogmatism. I got called into one of the professor's offices because my dogmatism level was extremely low -- especially for an incoming student -- and they were afraid I was going to lose my faith if I encountered knowledge that undermined what I had been taught at my home church. I explained my recent journey (that I was a recovering agnostic) and they were quite relieved. One of my friends who also started at the same time had filled his head for years with the garbage theology on religious television and suffered something of a crisis of faith. He left school after a year and well even deeper into fundamentalist charismatic King James Onlyism, and complained that the school was too liberal.

You'll want to check the news for what is currently happening with Paul Pressler. His public persona as a fierce defender of the faith was perfect cover for some of his sins. I've known about the stuff that is in the news since 1992, and affidavits for at least two of his victims have existed since the 1980s. The victims did not want to press charges because they knew they would be publicly destroyed by followers of Patterson/Pressler. Pressler even mentions "the lie" in his book, "A Hill on Which to Die," without naming what it was. And, of course, he blames it on "liberals." If you were aware of what was going on, you know exactly what he's talking about. He was being considered for a position in the George H.W. Bush administration, but the FBI background check revealed a lot of things that are coming out in the papers now. However, none of the victims would press charges at the time. So when you read Pressler's book, know what kind of person is telling the story and why they would want to embrace such a self-serving narrative that does not deal with all of the facts.

 

That is still as stupid and false as it ever was.

 

In the sixties, the “moderates” in the “Baptist school’s” did great damages.

Their teachers were the moderates of the 40’s and 50’s who (imo) drove the wagon off the road thinking they needed to blaze a new trail.

Modernism has pretty much killed the church and divided people.

It is like the “down grade” issues of Spurgeon’s day in its characteristic discrediting of conservatives and weakening of the veracity of the Scriptures.

 

You forgot to add that moderates means actually liberal, as in deciding not to obey full teachings of the scriptures to us, as what would be moderate, except in areas of theology and lifesyles?

 

Never was false or stupid.

 

i agree with you.

 

There is a difference between liberals and moderates. Liberals are represented by The Alliance of Baptists and the moderates by The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Judging by fruits -- words and actions, many so-called conservatives, then and now, would fail the "sniff" test that old Criswell imposed, including Criswell.

 

"May I speak on The Curse of Liberalism? Because of the opprobrious epithet "liberal," today they call themselves "moderates." A skunk by any other name still stinks!" ~ W. A. Criswell

 

basically, that Theistic Evolution is to be supported over a literal rerading of Genesis, Bible contains some mistakes in it, but in infallible as long as it speaks to theology issues, and tht we cannot be so dogmatics on salvation as the concervatives are!