Our Freedom in Christ
By William E. Hull
(Plenary session address to an annual meeting of the Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, First Baptist Church, Knoxville, Tennessee. Dr. Hull has served as Provost at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and at Samford University.)
When all is said and done, the Baptist movement will flourish or falter on the strength of its central mission. If our ultimate reason-for-being speaks compellingly to an enduring need of the human heart, then we can be used as agents of that cosmic redemption which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. But if our deepest identity is not shaped and sustained by some grand dimension of His gospel, then we will finally wither and wane no matter how frantically we struggle to survive. The distinctive principle which has made us what we are is well expressed in Galatians 5:1: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery" (NRSV).
I. Our Heritage
II. Our Hope
III. Our Heart
I. Our Heritage
The Protestant Reformation was part of that vast ferment through which Christianity passed in an effort to renew itself by challenging the traditional culture to which it had been wed for a thousand years. In England, the more radical reformers were not content merely to prune the exce`sses of medieval Catholicism but determined to restore the church to its apostolic purity. Hence the name Puritans, some of whom were driven by conscience to become Separatists, then Dissenters, and finally Baptists, born in the fires of persecution because they dared to challenge the established church and hence the entire social system which had existed since the time of Emperor Constantine.
At the center of this revolt was an insistence on the right of self-determination in religious affairs. Martin Luther had given theological legitimacy to this conviction in his doctrine of justification by faith, but the Baptists carried the principle of religious voluntarism into every area of belief and practice. In so doing, they became a revolutionary vanguard championing the primacy of individuals over institutions, of commitment over conformity, of autonomy over authority, of experience over establishment. Underlying all of these emphases was a stress on the sovereignty of the human spirit in its dealings with God.
In essence, Baptists emerged as a freedom movement 150 years before the American and French Revolutions forever altered our understanding of individual rights. That explains why they have languished in Europe until the present, as well as in America until the Constantinian legacy of established churches was abolished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights began to be implemented, Baptists at last found themselves in a climate where they could flourish. As a people of free churches in a free land, they quickly became, by the twentieth century, the largest evangelical movement in America. Why this dramatic reversal of fortunes? Because Baptists were uniquely suited by history and temperament to offer common people an understanding of the Christian faith that coincided with their quest for freedom in a new land of opportunity.
And so it is today as what Martin Marty calls "Baptistification" becomes the wave of the future in those countries seeking to throw off the yoke of a colonial or authoritarian past. In "Old World" countries where the hierarchical structures of a Constantinian legacy still dominate, Baptists are weak: England, Canada, Scandinavia, Continental Europe. But in "New World" countries where freedom is struggling for expression, Baptist growth is greatest: Russia, China, Korea, Africa, Latin America. Why? Because these are the places where the multitudes welcome our Baptist passion for individual self-determination, for freedom of choice for personal experience. The lessons of history are clear: Baptists are at their best when they share "the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21) with those who are hungry for freedom as the key to their highest fulfillment.
What, then, is the manifest destiny bequeathed to us by the past? To become again the "freedom movement" that we have always been. To seek out those with a stifled yearning for emancipation from the rigidities of modern life: those whose vision is constricted by lack of adequate education, those who chafe under ethnic prejudice or gender discrimination, those trapped in a stagnant economy without any chance for productive work, those who have migrated or immigrated to a place of permanent homelessness and are desperately in search of roots, those constrained by a collectivist business culture that offers prosperity at the price of captivity. Everywhere within our land, and far beyond its shores, are what Emma Lazarus called `huddled masses yearning to breathe free." If we will lift high the torch of Christian liberty in our day, as we have done so bravely in years gone by, then the freedom seekers of earth, who are still the vast majority of its citizens, will turn to us in hopes of finding for themselves "the freedom with which Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1).
II. Our Hope
How may this be done? By fearlessly proclaiming, in word and in deed those impelling convictions which have always been at the bedrock of our Baptist understanding of the Gospel. Chief among these has been our insistence on the primacy of personal conversion. Basic to the Baptist idea is a transforming encounter with God as we know Him in Jesus Christ through the witness of the Holy Spirit. So immediate is this divine/human relationship that there can be no proxy interposed between one`s soul and the Savior. Confession is completely uncoerced, baptism is voluntarily chosen, church membership is freely accepted, and discipleship is daily renewed.
To be sure, there are risks inherent in a religion of personal experience: subjective deception, psychological manipulation, emotional excesses. But Baptists dare to believe that God is intensely personal, that He seeks relationships with His own, and that He is great enough to authenticate His presence so that even the humblest believer can distinguish faith from fantasy. To insist upon conversion does not rule out the importance of nurture, as if everything is settled by an instantaneous and catastrophic change. But it does embrace a high view of human nature which contends that, slowly but surely, every person can be transformed from one order of being to another, a change so decisive that we are justified in calling it a "new birth."
This foundational understanding of the Christian life affects our approach to Holy Scripture as "the sole rule of faith and order." Historically, Baptists used this axiom to set the Bible above every creedal dogma, canon law, or papal edict that would prescribe the content of faith. But this does not mean that we were "for" the Bible while other denominations were "against" it. On the contrary, our most exalted words for the Bible – such as "inspired," "authoritative," or "infallible" – were borrowed from the confessions of others, especially in the Reformed tradition. The key issue, rather, was that the Constantinian churches tended to view ecclesiastical tradition as prescribing the correct way of interpreting the Bible, whereas Baptists insisted on going back to the Bible itself and interpreting it afresh under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Once again we may acknowledge the audacity of choosing the unsupervised interpretations of rank amateurs (i.e. laity) over the carefully controlled interpretations of accredited experts (i.e. clergy). The former was spontaneous while the latter had been sifted by centuries of usage. But Baptists did not take lightly their freedom to interpret the Bible for themselves. Instead, they pioneered a massive Sunday School movement which offered each member and inquirer an opportunity to study the Scriptures avidly, while many of their detractors were so complacent about the received tradition that they seldom bothered to go back and investigate its ultimate source. Implicit in the Baptist approach is a high expectation that even modestly educated lay persons, if genuinely led by the Spirit of God and genuinely open to instruction from one another, can go directly to the Bible and decide what it means for their lives. As with access to God in conversion, so access to God in Scripture must be unmediated and uncoerced.
This conviction, that the Christian life grows best when guided by persuasion from within rather than by pressure from without, accounts for our emphasis on "soul competency" and the "priesthood of the believer." These doctrines are not efforts to sidestep accountability for the spiritual decisions which we make. Rather, they are ways of saying that spiritual decisions are best made as acts of self-determination and not in response to demands by "the powers that be." We have trumpeted "separation of church and state" as a watchword, not because religion is good and politics is bad, but because we want to create an independent domain, free from entangling alliances with civil authority, where God alone is sovereign over the human spirit. We have no desire to shirk any temporal duty as citizens of the state, but neither do we want any earthly Caesar telling us what we should "render unto God" (Mark 12:17).
It is precisely here that our passionate commitment to evangelism may be understood. If Baptists cannot depend upon the laws of government, or the traditions of culture, or the pressures of society to insure the survival of Christianity, then we must accept personal responsibility for witnessing, to others. When the voluntary baptism of believers replaces the automatic baptism of infants, then the church is always one generation away from extinction. So Baptists insist on the right to propagate our faith, not because we have all of the right answers or because we are trying to build some tniumphalistic empire, but because every person on earth has the right to a free and independent choice!
III. Our Heart
But how may a movement of free individuals be fashioned into a cohesive fellowship? Religious voluntarism carries with it the central problem that Alexis de Tocqueville saw facing American democracy: namely, will individualism lead to fragmentation and finally to anarchy? There can be no doubt that the Baptist emphasis on soul competency deliberately dismantles the entire bulwark of church order erected by Constantinian Christianity. So radical was the decentralization permitted by our polity of local autonomy that the established churches at first denounced us as religious fanatics who deserved no standing in respectable society.
In place of the external constraints of clergy, creed, and council, Baptists based church order on a profoundly internal reality which the Apostle Paul called "the unity of the Spirit" (Ephesians 4:3). This oneness, bestowed on believers by the gift of conversion, defines the New Testament word koinonia, a sharing of life in Christ that we often translate as "fellowship." Because we understand the very nature of the church as a fellowship rather than as an institution, we view our congregations as families of faith, as communities of the called, as spiritual democracies in which every believer is equally important. Far from fostering fragmentation, the emphasis on self-governance means that each member is as responsible as every other member for the vitality of the body.
The same principles which guide the building of our churches also guide the building of our cooperative structures. Just as individual believers decide to belong to churches by voluntary acts of self determination, so individual churches decide to belong to various Baptist denominational groups by the same kind of uncoerced choice. In other words, the autonomy of the local church is but a corporate expression of the autonomy of the individual believer. This same autonomy extends to every level of denominational organization. The district, state, national, and world alliances, associations, conventions, and fellowships are all independent of each other, cooperating on a purely voluntary basis with no ascending or descending lines of authority that would give any of them control over the others. Our system of inviting "messengers" to periodic meetings rather than sending delegates to standing judicatories means that individual believers. acting freely as led by God`s Spirit, are the ultimate foundation both of our congregational and of our cooperative life.
Admittedly, many outsiders cannot understand the complete avoidance of hierarchical structures that that would organize us into some kind of geographical pyramid. Far from producing chaos, however, this polity of voluntary connectionalism provides the best incentive structure to insure effective cooperation. For it means that everything we do as a denomination lives or dies by whether it is truly meeting the needs of the people. Rather than operating with a headquarters mentality by which standardized programs are handed down from on high, our decentralized system of governance is intended to encourage a wide diversity of programs and services from the various agencies that we choose to support. It is true that uniformity has a certain appeal to the authoritarian mind, but those who call for a monolithic expression of Baptist life have not fully grasped the genius of our strategy for becoming a truly indigenous movement ministering to the full spectrum of human diversity in a pluralistic society.
Our basic Baptist idea of freedom places us at the center of one of the great ferments in world history. Perhaps the most decisive issue of our epoch is whether earth`s children are to be governed from below or from above. Will human destiny be determined by the common people, the disenfranchised masses, the neglected majority? Or by the traditional elites, the hereditary aristocracies, the privileged minorities? A long-suppressed grass-roots yearning for freedom is beginning to assert itself around the world as whole populations, particularly in the totalitarian Second World and the underdeveloped Third World, cry out for the inalienable right to choose their own future. Baptists are well positioned by heritage, by hope, and by heart to respond to this yearning with the Gospel if we will but "stand firm in the freedom with which Christ has set us free!"
