Anatomy of a Reformation by Paige Patterson

Author:Paige Patterson [Patterson, Paige]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: patterson, 1978, anatomy, southern baptist convention, reformation, 2004, sbc
Publisher: Seminary Hill Press
Published: 2011-06-10T21:57:02+00:00

III. REDIRECTION AND HOPE

What are the results? At the end of 25 years of conservative advance, new executives committed to the resurgence and to the inerrancy of Scripture have been installed in all of the agencies and institutions. Every board of trustees is decidedly conservative. Giving has reached all time highs in recent years. The six seminaries have ballooned from 10,000 to 15,000 students. Mission programs and offerings continue to grow with more than 5,000 career missionaries now under appointment and with personnel in more than 180 countries. Dozens of new evangelically-minded professors have taken their places on seminary faculties. The New American Commentary was authorized by the Sunday School Board (now LifeWay Christian Resources) to be written only by those who could sign the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Southern Baptists have always boasted that they were not a creedal people. However, the intent of such an avowal was neither the abdication of doctrine nor the enthronement of theological anarchy. Implicit within the denial of creedalism was an affirmation and a negation. Baptists needed no creed since the Bible is a "perfect treasure" of divine wisdom. No human creed can trump Scripture.

Nevertheless, confessional statements, summaries of those truths most widely invoked among Baptists have always been employed both to distinguish Baptists from other Christian denominations and to provide guidelines for the Baptist agencies and institutions that serve the churches. The Baptist Faith and Message was adopted in 1925 as a revision of the New Hampshire Confession of 1833. Once again, this confession was revised in 1963. The 1963 revision was influenced by the inroads of neo-orthodoxy in several of its articles, particularly Article I on the Scriptures.

In 1996, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention authorized President Tom Elliff to appoint a committee to bring a proposal for an article on the family to be added to The Baptist Faith and Message. In 1998, the committee reported and added an article on the family that generated national and international discussion and criticism. The committee skillfully anticipated later socio-political discussions on the nature of marriage and also dealt with a number of other highly-charged issues, which set the Southern Baptist Convention at odds with the conventional wisdom of post-modernism.

This document, as adopted by 95 percent of the messengers, reads:

God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.