by Frank Turk
Dan is doing pastorly things today, and Phil always has his hands full, so that leaves either me or Pecadillo to fill the bandwidth today. Since he fights crime for a living, I guess it has to be me.
On the heels of the dust-up over at the Southern Baptist Convention, someone recently quipped that being a baptist (small "b" intended) is about ecclesiology and not about soteriology, which at its core is true enough. However, I think a lot of our non-baptist friends would be quick to point out that this is prolly a pretty narrow view of what happens when you adopt a credobaptist view of baptism vs. a paedobaptist view of baptism. For example, you don't find a lot of Presbyterian street preachers or Lutheran missionaries.
But that said, I think the very-narrow distinction proffered there misses the point of the complaint leveled by the "traditional" complainers. The fellows who want the 50-year-old populist theology replete with the ol' convention songs are not concerned with being small-"b" baptists: they are concerned about being, as they see it, Southern Baptists®. If we recognize that, the rest of their complaints and angry eyebrows make a lot more sense. They don't want to accidentally be Presbyterians or Lutherans or Methodists (which is ironic, given the kind of theology they are sending up the flag pole).
At the end of the day, they are standing up for a kind of Christian culture. There's something vaguely-admirable about that when we are in the decline of Western Civilization, even if it also vaguely resembles the kind of religion that had a closed magisterium and built giant cathedrals to really pack 'em in.
On the heels of the dust-up over at the Southern Baptist Convention, someone recently quipped that being a baptist (small "b" intended) is about ecclesiology and not about soteriology, which at its core is true enough. However, I think a lot of our non-baptist friends would be quick to point out that this is prolly a pretty narrow view of what happens when you adopt a credobaptist view of baptism vs. a paedobaptist view of baptism. For example, you don't find a lot of Presbyterian street preachers or Lutheran missionaries.
But that said, I think the very-narrow distinction proffered there misses the point of the complaint leveled by the "traditional" complainers. The fellows who want the 50-year-old populist theology replete with the ol' convention songs are not concerned with being small-"b" baptists: they are concerned about being, as they see it, Southern Baptists®. If we recognize that, the rest of their complaints and angry eyebrows make a lot more sense. They don't want to accidentally be Presbyterians or Lutherans or Methodists (which is ironic, given the kind of theology they are sending up the flag pole).
At the end of the day, they are standing up for a kind of Christian culture. There's something vaguely-admirable about that when we are in the decline of Western Civilization, even if it also vaguely resembles the kind of religion that had a closed magisterium and built giant cathedrals to really pack 'em in.
