Southern Baptists Are Both Missional and Confessional: A Response to Rick Warren
In the Baptist church, some phrases live forever. On any given Sunday, you'll hear a pious deacon praying for a "hedge of protection" around someone in need. Or an evangelistic preacher prompting the congregation with the words, "Every head bowed and every eye closed." In some churches, you may hear another time-worn Baptist expression: "There's no creed but the Bible." Unlike the other time-honored idioms, this expression is a myth. In fact, "No creed but the Bible" is a creed.
Baptists today should be quick to point out the irony of Bible-only-ism, but in some quarters, the opposite has been the case. The myth of Baptist anticreedalism has recently been resuscitated by Rick Warren, who implores fellow Southern Baptists to "return to the original Baptist Vision of unity through a mission, not a confession." According to Warren, "That would heal the SBC."
More Context
What does Pastor Rick Warren's campaign represent in Southern Baptist politics?
Unfortunately, Warren's vision is revisionist. Through most of Baptist history, Baptists' confessionalism hasn't been pitted against our missional work of evangelism, church planting, and sending missionaries. Traditionally, among Baptists, the question hasn't been if a church affirms a creed but which creed they affirm.
For half a millennium, Baptists have had confessions. From the London Confessions of the 17th century to the Philadelphia Confession of the 18th to the New Hampshire Confession of the 19th to the Baptist Faith and Message in the 20th (and 21st), Baptists have always been a confessing people, and they weren't the only ones confessing their faith.
Baptists today should be quick to point out the irony of Bible-only-ism, but the myth has recently been resuscitated by Rick Warren.
In 1644, English Particular Baptists were eager to show they weren't hostile to the national church, but they claimed, "We cannot do anything contrary to our understanding and consciences." After the Act of Toleration (1689), English Baptists wished to demonstrate continuity with the other Reformed brethren in England, and they used the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) as a basic framework for their Second London Confession (1689), with a few modifications.
The Philadelphia Confession (1742), the first generally used Baptist confession in colonial America, was largely based on the Second London Confession. But in New England, where Baptist persecution was worst and state-sponsored confessions were most coercive, an emphasis on the conscience increased. As a result, Baptist confessions weren't generally adopted in the land of the Puritans to the extent they were in the Middle Colonies, Virginia, and North Carolina.
After the First Great Awakening, the so-called Separate Baptist movement emerged from Congregationalism. This movement quickly juxtaposed and contrasted authentic, biblical religion with lifeless confessionalism and the moribund spirituality of the state-sponsored church. During this time, the missional work of the Separates proliferated. One Separate Baptist from Connecticut, Shubal Stearns, planted one of the most prolific churches in Baptist history, Sandy Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina. As a result, Sandy Creek (and the stream of churches that followed it) wasn't as rigorously confessional as other Baptist traditions.
Does this stream's missional growth give some historic weight to Warren's claim that Baptists would be better off without a common confession? No, even the Sandy Creek Association adopted Principles of Faith in 1816 and, for the sake of unity in mission, eventually adopted the 1833 New Hampshire Confession in 1845.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) grew from these deep Baptist roots of confession and conscience. Oliver Hart, the third pastor of the Southern Baptist "mother church" First Baptist Charleston, was the chief architect of the Charleston Association, the first such association of Baptist churches in the South. Hart was a product of evangelism, having sat as a boy under the preaching of arch-evangelist George Whitefield.
Though a Regular Baptist (from the Philadelphia Association, and with roots in England), he ordained Separate Baptists (with roots in New England). Hart also produced the Charleston Confession (1767), a document drawn from the Philadelphia Confession that later formed the basis for Southern Seminary's Abstract of Principles (1858).
These two ideas--liberty of conscience and the duty of evangelism--grew together in Baptist confessional life.
In 1845, William B. Johnson, who became the inaugural president of the SBC, boasted in the "Baptist aversion for all creeds but the Bible," suggesting he opposed creeds, but Johnson was also complex. Though he rejected creedal authority, he supported institutions and men who promoted confessions in Baptist life.
When welcomed to the floor as the fourth president of the Triennial Convention, Johnson paid homage to his predecessor and boyhood hero, "the sainted Furman," and his appeal for forming the new Southern Baptist Convention sounded somewhat confessional. Though the newly formed SBC "constructed for [their] basis no new creed," Johnson nevertheless appealed to some form of common "Bible ground" to which all Baptists in the denomination should be committed. Perhaps unwittingly, Johnson believed in doctrinal boundaries.
In his plea for Baptists to be missional as opposed to confessional, Rick Warren has argued, "For 80 years, the SBC grew without ANY confession." The convention's founding without a "new creed" and its first president W. B. Johnson's anticreedal sentiments provide some fodder for this perspective, but Warren's statement is misleading. It misrepresents the way confessions and freedom of conscience have operated in Baptist life in America.
Baptist churches, which believe in congregational authority and "democratic religion," refuse to force other Baptist churches to adopt a particular set of doctrines. But when cooperating for the sake of mission, they've long been a confessing people.
As far north as New England and south as Florida, Southern Baptist churches in the mid-to-late 19th century adopted the New Hampshire Confession because it accommodated strict Calvinists and non-Calvinists alike. When Southwestern Seminary was founded in 1908, it also adopted the New Hampshire Confession as its articles of faith. Other churches aligned more closely with the Second London Confession. For example, when the Florida Association petitioned for admission to the Georgia Baptist Convention in 1846 following the original SBC, there was a "protracted debate" over Flordia's use of the New Hampshire Confession.
The Baptists' emphasis upon the priority of the Bible along with their consistent use of creeds supports historian Greg Wills's claim that Baptists today
have been misled by attending only to what Baptists said--and only to part of what they said--rather than to what they did. In their pleas for liberty of conscience and congregationalism, Baptists berated other denominations as creedal and called for "no creed but the Word of God," but they encountered creeds every time they entered their churches and association meetings.
Creeds were vital for doctrinal and missional unity because they provided the agreement and standards necessary for Baptists to walk together in fulfillment of the Great Commission.
Creeds were vital for doctrinal and missional unity because they provided the agreement and standards necessary for Baptists to walk together in fulfillment of the Great Commission
The introduction to the original Baptist Faith and Message (BFM 1925) states that "any group of Baptists, large or small, have the inherent right to draw up for themselves and publish to the world a confession of their faith whenever they think it advisable to do so."
Baptist churches are free to make confessions. They're also free from having their consciences violated by a confession. Therefore, instead of attempting to alter the long-standing confessions of others, Baptists always have the right to withdraw cooperation and make their own confessions. As a Baptist, Rick Warren is encouraged to exercise this freedom.
Though the SBC didn't adopt its confession until 1925, this in no way means Southern Baptists were without confessions or were anticonfessional. In fact, the SBC used the New Hampshire Confession as the basis for the BFM because so many Baptist churches had already adopted it. When it was producing the original BFM, the American Baptist Theological Seminary--founded in 1924 as an interracial, cooperative endeavor between the SBC and the black National Baptist Convention (NBC)--drew up a confession modeled largely on the Articles of Religious Belief of the Baptist Bible Institute of New Orleans (later New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary).
The SBC's dual emphasis on confessions and liberty of conscience unites the Convention to its English Baptist roots. Contrary to what some may think (or tweet), Southern Baptists have never been an anticreedal people. We find our unity in both doctrine and mission. Can Southern Baptists be both missional and confessional? Yes, we've always been.