The BioLogos-Southern Baptist Theologian Dialogue:
Is Darwinism Theologically Neutral?

Posted on May 13, 2012 by the editors of SBC Today

How should Twenty-first Century Christians interpret the creation accounts in the book of Genesis?  How can these biblical creation accounts be reconciled with contemporary scientific accounts? Is theistic evolution tenable, or should we believe in creationism or intelligent design?

We posted an announcement earlier about a dialogue addressing these questions, an ongoing dialogue between some Southern Baptist scholars and some Christian scientists from the BioLogos organization. The BioLogos Foundation is a group of Christians who see “evolution as the means by which God created life, in contrast to Atheistic Evolutionism, Intelligent Design, and Creationism.” In essence they are looking to prove that the findings in science are compatible with the Christian faith. BioLogos was founded by Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project and currently head of the National Institutes for Health.

Each dialogue in this “Southern Baptist Voices” series on the biologos.org website features an article or two articles from a Southern Baptist scholar, with a response from a BioLogos scholar.The series arose from a discussion between Dr. Ken Keathley, Senior Vice President for Academic Administration of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Darrell Falk, President of BioLogos.

In the first pair of articles, Dr. Keathley submitted a two part article that we referenced on March 14, 2012 (click here). From this original discussion, BioLogos is building series, in which the BioLogos staff will dialogue with such invited noteable Southern Baptist scholars as: Dr. John D. Laing, Dr. Bruce Little, Dr. John Hammet, Dr. Steve Lemke, Dr. William Dembski, and Dr. James K. Dew.

The next Baptist guest in the series is Dr. William Dembski, Research Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and well-known advocate of the intelligent design movement, who is addressing the question “Is Darwinism Theologically Neutral.”

In part 1, Dembski compares the “non-negotiables” of Christianity with the “non-negotiables of Darwinism (click here). And in part 2 (click here) he continues his analysis of the comparison of the non-negotiable tenets, concluding that the evidence for Darwinism is the real crux of the matter, not whether it is or is not theologically neutral.

As with other internet discussions, BioLogos has included an arena for comments and responses. We, at SBC Today, would like to invite Southern Baptists to join in this scholarly dialogue as it unfolds over the next few weeks.

Posted in Announcements, Creation | 1 Comment

Vanderbilt University’s Discriminatory Policies
Against Campus Religious Organizations:
An Update

Posted on May 11, 2012 by the editors of SBC Today

In February 2012, SBC Today published a series of articles warning about the impact of Vanderbilt University’s “all comers” policies on Christian student organizations on campus (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). The so-called “non-discrimination policy,” which in fact discriminates against Christian groups, insists that the campus Christian organizations cannot limit their leadership positions to Christians. The university is not applying these “all comers” rules to other campus organizations such as fraternities (except for a Christian fraternity) or sororities. The Tennessee legislature has passed a bill that would pressure Vanderbilt to reverse this egregious policy, but Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has announced he will veto it (see story in the National Review). These actions have been opposed by scores of Christian groups and national leaders (many of these are cited in Part 4 noted above, along with ways you can voice your opinion).

In all, fourteen Christian organizations have refused to submit to the “all comers” policy. Eleven Christian campus organizations, including Vanderbilt Catholic, have formed a group called “Vanderbilt Solidarity” to oppose the religious discrimination being instituted by the policy (see the Washington Post story, The Foundry blog of the Network story, the Nashville National Public Radio story, and the Vanderbilt InterVarsity Christian Fellowship blog story).

The most recent happening in this story is that the Vanderbilt Baptist Campus Ministry has also declined to receive recognized student organization status, because they could not in good conscience sign the required Vanderbilt policies (see the Baptist and Reflector article and the Associated Baptist Press article).

Already, several other private and public universities have quietly enacted the Vanderbilt “all comers” policy themselves. If this policy is followed nationwide, it will severely hamper access of Christian campus ministries to college students at this key time in their lives.
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Posted in Culture, Religious Liberty | Leave a comment

Get the NOBTS iPhone App Free at the iTunes Store

Posted on May 11, 2012 by the editors of SBC Today

As you come to New Orleans for the 2012 SBC Convention, you might want to download the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary iPhone app, which was released this Spring. The NOBTS app has many of the features can help you while you’re in town, and others that you may find helpful at any time:

  • The NEWS TAB provides breaking information on upcoming events, such as the Greer-Heard Forum, archeological dig information, trustee news, and life at NOBTS.
  • The CHAPEL TAB provides links to listen or watch recent chapel services.
  • The INFO TAB provides maps of the campus, both an illustrated map and a Google map, as well as key contact information for the campus.
  • The EVENTS TAB brings up the campus calendar and information on other events around the NOBTS campuses
  • The ACADEMICS TAB provides information on courses (including hybrid and online courses) for both NOBTS and Leavell College.
  • The ALUMNI TAB provides NOBTS alumni with items specifically designated for them

However, the NOBTS app has a feature you may find helpful wherever you are. Bored standing in a line? Whip out the Greek and Hebrew vocabulary flash cards feature! You can brush up on your Biblical language skills while you have some free time!

  • The TOOLBOX TAB provides Greek and Hebrew vocabulary flashcards that can be used by anyone taking these languages in schools around the world. The vocabulary lists are from Dr. Gerald Stevens’ New Testament Greek Primer and cover the key introductory words in biblical Greek. The Hebrew vocabulary lists are based on verb and noun frequency. What makes this feature especially useful for all students of biblical languages is that you can create custom vocabulary lists tailored to your own needs and interests.

The NOBTS iPhone app can be downloaded for free from the Apple iTunes store. Search for NOBTS on the store or go to NOBTS on iTunes.

Posted in Announcements | Leave a comment

Calvin Is My Fallible Friend

Posted on May 10, 2012 by David Crosby

By David E. Crosby, Pastor,
First Baptist Church,
New Orleans, Louisiana

The lapel buttons worn by a church staff displayed “WWCS.” I asked what the letters meant and they said, “What would Calvin say?”

My response: “Who cares?” Ever since I saw those buttons I have wanted to ask those fellows why they put Calvin’s name where the name of Jesus should be.

John Calvin is my friend, of course, as historic believers may be who have influenced us in positive ways. I enjoyed reading portions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and he has definitely influenced my thinking about God and salvation.

Calvin did continue to baptize infants (which I do not endorse), and at one time he ran Geneva like the city belonged to him, which seems to me to be a confusion between the city of God and the city of men. Most lamentably, he consented to the execution of Servetus in Geneva as a heretic. Executing anybody for their religious opinions should be off the agenda for followers of the executed heretic, Jesus of Nazareth.

Calvin was not perfect, we all would agree. He created an amazing systematic theology which is not perfect, either. The Bible is the infallible Word of God. The Institutes are not.
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Posted in Doctrine | 141 Comments

Going Inward: Taking the Gospel to an Unlikely Place

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Marilyn Stewart

Marilyn Stewart is a weekly religion events columnist in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and is a free-lance writer for the Louisiana Baptist Message and other publications.

*names in this article are changed to protect identities.

It’s only Wednesday night, but the strip clubs on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street are busy.

The crowded street is awash in neon light as tourists, some with children, snap souvenir pictures. Inside, tears stream down a dancer’s face when the women of Inward step into her dressing room. God has answered her prayer.

“I asked Jesus to send someone,” she said. Tricia* needed help in breaking free.

Inward, a ministry that is showing God’s love in a place where the need is great, began when women of New Orleans churches felt burdened for the women of Bourbon Street. Without a template and with few ministries to model, they started by simply taking gifts of chocolate to the dancers.

Two years in, Inward is making a difference.

“Our ladies have followed the footprints of Jesus to Bourbon Street and found people in need who want to hear and see God’s love,” said David Crosby, pastor of First Baptist New Orleans.

The ministry has hosted four breakfasts for workers in a room above a club in the early hours of the morning, after closing time. Attendance is growing.

“The word is spreading,” said Maggie Broussard. “People say to us, ‘Oh, you’re that group that does the breakfasts.’”

At the breakfasts, the women share the gospel as they talk to dancers, bartenders, and managers – both men and women. Across town, prayer partners gather at First Baptist New Orleans to pray as text-messaged updates about conversations come in.
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Posted in Discipleship, Evangelism | 2 Comments

Is There a Bridge over the Troubled Waters
of Our Soteriological Divide?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Chris Bonts


Dr. Bonts is the Senior Pastor of Parkway Baptist Church in Auburn, Alabama.  He has earned a BA in Theology from The Baptist College of Florida, and an MDiv and PhD from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Over the course of my fifteen years in ministry, Southern Baptists have written much in defense of various positions on the doctrine of salvation within the Southern Baptist Convention. Calvinist blogs sprung up en masse, defending the views many felt Southern Baptists had neglected for the better part of a century. Non-Calvinist blogs responded with a remonstrance of sorts to defend their view of our theological heritage. Others have even tried to advocate a “baptist” doctrine of salvation, which is odd, given that “baptist” has always been a moniker that described one’s doctrine of the church.

Those who enter the fray usually share a common denominator: a desire for scriptural faithfulness. The debate over God’s providence in salvation, however, often causes us to lose sight of the common understanding of evangelism and salvation that have held Southern Baptists together for over 150 years. By focusing so much upon what separates us, we have forgotten the beliefs that unite us and allow us to cooperate.

Southern Baptists’ Common Beliefs Regarding the Doctrine of Salvation

  1. Apart from a personal relationship with Christ Jesus, all of humanity is lost. The lost are dead in their transgressions and sin (Eph 2:1-3).
  2. Because of their sinful, willful transgression of God’s law, unbelievers are enslaved to their sin (John 8:34) and blinded to the gospel (2 Cor 4:4).
  3. Unbelievers do not seek God of their own initiative (Rom 3:11); unbelievers do not come to Jesus unless drawn by the Father (John 6:44).
  4. The drawing of the Father occurs as the Spirit works through the preaching of the gospel (Rom 10:17). None can be saved apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ (Rom 10:5-20; John 14:6).
  5. The gospel is the message of the sinless life, penal substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection of Jesus from the grave (1 Cor 15). Salvation is entirely of God, entirely of grace, and is received entirely through faith (Eph 2:8-9).
  6. The gospel includes an urgent call to respond to Jesus Christ in repentance and faith (conversion). Conversion involves repentance (a turning away from sin). Faith is belief in and receipt of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross whereby one surrenders to Jesus as Lord.
  7. Jesus commands all Christians everywhere to endeavor to carry the gospel to the nations in obedience to the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20).

To be sure, Southern Baptists have a great deal more in common than what I have listed. These commonalities, however, should remind us that when it comes to the gospel of King Jesus and the command of the Great Commission, there is more to unite us than divide us. For the sake of cooperation and kingdom advance, we must move beyond the sometimes petty arguments about what was going on in the mind of God in eternity past as he planned to create humanity. Instead, we must move toward a cooperative effort to populate the community of God for eternity future through the preaching of the gospel. After all, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded, in part, for the sake of evangelistic cooperation. While there is certainly a time and place for the irenic discussion of the tertiary theological issues in Scripture, at the point where they begin to affect our willingness to cooperate (and from my observation point, they have), then we have quit following Jesus Christ as a convention. An inward focus always prevents an outward impact.

Posted in Salvation | 24 Comments

Monday Exposition Idea:
Do you believe this?
(John 11:25-26)

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Franklin Kirksey

By Franklin L. Kirksey, Pastor, First Baptist Church of Spanish Fort, Alabama, and author of Sound Biblical Preaching: Giving the Bible a Voice.

These expositions by Dr. Kirksey are offered to suggest sermon or Bible study ideas for pastors and other church leaders, both from the exposition and from the illustrative material, or simply for personal devotion.

Introduction

Do you believe this? You might hear this question as two young boys make their way through an attraction called “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” They bill this attraction as “EVERYTHING ODD, WEIRD & UNBELIEVABLE!”[1] Ten years ago at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, as I perused the personal library of Dr. R.G. Lee, I found a copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Dr. Lee filled his sermons with interesting anecdotes.
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Posted in Discipleship, Preaching | Leave a comment

Established Faith Begins at The Cross

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Bob Williford

By Bob Williford, former director of the Hope Migrant Mission Center at the Migrant Farm Labor Center near Hope, Arkansas (a ministry of the Arkansas Baptist Convention), and author of Fence Post Digest blog.

Colossians 2:7-15

7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.
8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. 9 For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, 10 and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority; 11 and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ; 12 having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. 13 When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, 14 having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15 When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

7 having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.

 

Two very important aspects of the believer’s relationship with the Christ are given here:

Paul reminds us of the importance of being instructed in the Word of God. Every believer will demonstrate a commitment to the Father and following the instruction of Christ.

The instruction sets the standard for the faith of developing and sustaining a faithful relationship with Jesus. The believer cannot sustain a healthy faith without the support that is found in Scripture.
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Posted in Discipleship, Doctrine, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

To the Garden Alone:
The Life and Legacy of Edgar Young Mullins
Part Two

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Wes Kenney

By Wes Kenney, currently a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

Read Part One here.

The impact of Mullins on Southern Baptist life and theology scarcely can be overstated, and most of this legacy was a result of his tenure as president of Southern, which lasted until his death in 1928. As the head of what was, at the time of his election, the only Southern Baptist Seminary, he was immediately influential in the convention, serving on key committees and enjoying free access to the various organs of the denominational press. Additionally, he served as the elected president of the SBC from 1921 to 1924, and as president of the Baptist World Alliance in 1928, ensuring his place as a Baptist statesman virtually without peer, before or since.

The key to theological understanding for Edgar Young Mullins was the role of experience in the life of the Christian. This was the point from which he began the theological task,[1] and this understanding will be shown, in the remainder of this article, to be the defining factor in shaping his approach to the controversies from which his legacy to Southern Baptists would be drawn. The biographical and theological will be blended henceforth, for only taken together can they demonstrate the influence that he would hold even in the present day.

The desire to find middle ground, a mediating position, in virtually every controversy in which he was involved was a hallmark of Mullins’s career. This desire grew out of his fascination with and appropriation of the methodology of philosophers such as the pragmatism of William James, the personalism of William Parker Browne, and especially of the theological approach of Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom theology was not “the systematic expression of revealed truth, but reflection upon religious experience.”[2]

The resignation just before Mullins assumed the presidency of Southern of the lone member of the faculty unsupportive of his election, F. H. Kerfoot, meant that rather than teaching church history as he had planned, Mullins would teach theology.[3] This would prove significant, as Mullins view of the importance of individual experience would lead him to distance himself from the classical Calvinism of James Petigru Boyce and the other founders of the school,[4] in favor of a via media (middle path) between Calvinism and Arminianism. As Mullins himself would write, with phrasing that could be quite helpful in current controversies within the SBC, “We are learning to discard both names and to adhere more closely than either to the Scriptures, while retaining the truth in both systems.”[5]
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Posted in Biography | 11 Comments

To the Garden Alone:
The Life and Legacy of Edgar Young Mullins
Part One

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Wes Kenney

By Wes Kenney, currently a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.

 

So begins Charles Austin Miles’s gospel song entitled In the Garden. Written in 1912, its lyrical depiction of a personal and intimate religious experience with the risen Christ illustrates well the theology, and indeed the legacy to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), of Edgar Young Mullins, fourth president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this two part blog article, I will summarize the life of Mullins, provide a brief analysis of his understanding of the role of experience in the life of the Christian, and discuss how his work based on that understanding influenced the theological consensus that dominated the SBC for much of the twentieth century.

Before a discussion of Mullins’s impact on Southern Baptist life, we will survey the beginnings of the career of this leader, a career that had great impact on Baptist life and thought and continues to have influence today.

The fourth of eleven children, and the first son, borne by Sarah Cornelia Barnes Tillman Mullins to her husband Seth Granberry Mullins, Edgar Young Mullins was born on 5 January 1860 in Franklin County, Mississippi. Seth Mullins was a Baptist preacher like his father before him, and an 1857 graduate of Mississippi College.

Though the Civil War did not directly affect the Seth Mullins household, they did suffer great economic turmoil, as did the Baptist churches of Mississippi. War was also accompanied by a general breakdown of law and order across the South. Reconstruction did not improve life for Mississippians like the Mullins family, and late in 1869, they began the journey west to Texas. They eventually settled in Corsicana, where Seth aided in the reorganization of a Baptist church, and established a school. It was in this school that the young Edgar would receive his first formal instruction. Though he grew up in the home of a Baptist preacher, he was not coerced by his parents to accept their beliefs, and would not profess faith in Christ until adulthood.[1]
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Posted in Biography | 1 Comment