The Baptist Journey of Faith and Learning

The Baptist Journey of Faith and Learning
by R. Kirby Godsey

Dr. Kirby Godsey is the President of Mercer University. He is a graduate of Samford University, the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary where he earned the Doctor of Theology degree with a major in Christian Ethics, and Tulane University where he earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree. He gave this address to a meeting of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Atlanta last April; and it is printed here with his kind permission. It is included not in spite of but because of its specificity, its particularity, its authentic provinciality. It is said that reasoning is the process by which we consciously draw inferences from premises. Since Aristotle, deductive reasoning is said to move from generals to particulars, and inductive reasoning is said to move from particulars to generals. In the incarnation, God moved from the general realms of deity and heaven to the particular realms of humanity and earth. It is the best way to communicate. In this article, Dr. Godsey`s focus on Baptists, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Mercer University, and Mercer`s new theological seminary in Atlanta constitutes a concentrated look at particulars from which it is hoped that Christian Ethics Today readers will move to other kinds of particulars and then to wider and more universal generals, applying Dr. Godsey`s insights to situations and worlds beyond his particulars.

I am a Baptist. My vocation is education. And my vocation has allowed me to bring together my life of learning and my life of faith.

Neither journey has been without its troubles and its turmoil. Neither the life of faith nor the life of learning.

In my journeys within education I have seen Baptist schools and secular universities up close. And I have been part of a Baptist university as it has struggled to shape its character. I have weighed in on the side of making Mercer a Baptist university. But the struggle is never-ending.

My journey of faith has carried me through the dead-heat of Baptist turmoil. I have mourned our losses and been preoccupied with our defeats. But I see a new day coming.

I am learning that being Baptist is a much larger world, a much higher calling than being a Southern Baptist. My journey has taken me beyond the boundaries of Southern Baptists. But hear me say I have no quarrel with Southern Baptists. I have no quarrel with those brothers and sisters who need to hold onto the mantle of being a Southern Baptist. It is their comfort zone. But out of the mourning called grief, I have come to the dawning of a new morning called light. For me, being Baptist is a higher calling.

Southern Baptists continue to be a large denomination. They continue to be powerful. They continue to be rich. They have achieved giant corporate status and they wield real political clout.

But in the process, they seem to have buried the treasure of being Baptist.

We have witnessed, first hand, a religious debacle-one more denomination suffering from decay, losing its soul in search of political power and religious prestige.

But it would be self-centered to lose heart. Baptists are not, after all, the hope of the world. God`s universe is not somehow waiting silently to see what in the world happens to Baptists. To think that the hope of humankind depends upon politics in Nashville is myopic and arrogant. Baptists have never been the source of all truth and we have not become the center of God`s universe.

Our only reason for being is to serve as instruments of hope and grace. More simply put, Baptists were not called to become one more corporate giant in neon lights. Baptists were called to be simple priests, bearers of light, a family of faith living out the reality of God`s presence in our world.

We do the best we can but when it comes to religious organizations, we can usually recognize the signs of decay. We become rigid and exclusive, confident that we have a corner on God`s truth. We become preoccupied with the contours of the denomination. We reorganize and streamline. We begin to squabble over the boundaries-whether here or there, a little to the left or a little to the right.

We should have seen it coming. We began to look to our feuds and to our close votes to add excitement and stamina to our meetings. We began to squabble about who had the truth and whose truth and message would prevail. It was mostly nonsense. Surely we do not believe that God is really interested in our petty disputes.

My celebration of being Baptist has brought me to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. For me, the CBF was born, not to lick our wounds, not to weep together in our defeat, not to compete against the jubilant noise of those who have taken over the SBC. The CBF was born as a way of recentering ourselves on the truth that we are not here to fight. We are here to minister. We are not here to shout or demean one another. We are here to preach and to teach. We are not here to recite the right religious ideology. We are here to forgive. We are not here to eclipse the gospel with our mindless bickering. We are here to embody the gospel in our own honest caring. We are not enforcers. We are not the Gestapo for some misguided form of Calvinism. You and I are here to give flesh and blood to the gospel. We are not here to make sure that people recite the right language. We are here to be God`s people. We are not here to require that people embrace the latest version of fundamentalist orthodoxy. We are here to give people hope, to bear light amidst the shadows, to teach, to live out grace. We are here to help people in Jesus` name and to ask questions later.

Caring is not something grandiose. It is not a theological proposition. It is certainly not a denominational posture. Caring is not a skyscraper. It is not a new organizational structure. Caring is not about getting a patent on the name of Lottie Moon.

Caring means to heal the sick, to help the poor, to shelter the homeless, to teach the ignorant. It means setting people free of disease and setting them free of prejudice. It means looking out for people who are lonely and taking up for people who are powerless.

The fact is that Southern Baptists became like most other denominational organizations, less Baptist and more authoritarian, less grace and more hype. Over and over again, churches and the denominations become servants of the culture. Power and popularity, the rhythms of Saturday night become the beat of Sunday morning. Jesus slips out the back door unnoticed to go look after the hungry.

My journey teaches me that as Baptists grow and succeed, they inevitably become enamored with their own success. The first thing you know we find ourselves trying to manipulate denominational politics-fundamentalists and moderates alike, while the homeless are sleeping under bridges and violence and abuse run rampant in our streets.

Being Baptist is a higher calling. Being Baptist is about caring, and caring is a different calling. It is God`s call. It means bringing water to the thirsty in Jesus` name, pushing back the shadows of ignorance in Jesus` name. So being Baptist calls us back to our beginnings. Our birthright lies in lifting people up in Jesus` name. And unless helping people in Jesus` name prevails, our rhetoric and our proclamations and our political convocations, called Baptist conventions, are nothing more than a noisy charade that veils the skeletal remains of a dead denomination.

None of us is exempt from the perils of success. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will have to struggle to hold onto its soul. We do not gather in the Fellowship to be one more political forum. We gather to celebrate our faith as Baptists-a people who are free to believe, free to listen out for God, free to respond to God`s call unencumbered by race or gender. We gather as people who are free to worship and free to think, free to hold Jesus high as the Word of God and free to interpret the Bible as the record of God`s revelation. We gather as people who are free to be the church, free to preach, and free to teach. The formation of the CBF should give us courage to be Baptists again, to loose ourselves from the bitterness and the fear and the resentment of being part of a denomination that has wasted much of its passion and energy in the raging war of power politics. Let us never be drawn back into that civil war. If the fundamentalists win or the liberals win, Baptists lose. Among Southern Baptists, the fundamentalists won. Baptists lost.

My Baptist journey has also carried me to the towers of academia. Success in academia is just as enchanting as success in the denomination. I watched and listened as colleagues would have Mercer to be done with our Baptist connections. Shake the Baptist dust from our feet. It was an enchanting idea. It was a road I could not and would not take. As a Baptist university, I believe that we must be a force for preserving our Baptist identity and our Baptist principles.

When I studied Baptist history, I have been astonished by the historical significance of education in the rise of the missionary impulse. The missionary force in the early 19th century was awash on the shoals of Baptist conflict. Almost dead. Opposition to missions was fierce. Some associations in Georgia struggled against the notion of a Baptist general convention precisely because it would encourage missions and education. In 1822, in Georgia, a motion to extend the gospel by missions met this response, "A motion was made to lay the matter on the table, amended by a motion to throw the matter under the table, and then by another, to kick the bearer of the motion out of the house." Historians record that the motion was carried by a rising vote, some of them leaping up and down and afterwards escorting the motion maker to the door, threatening physical harm if he ever again pronounced the word "missions," in the presence of that body.

Study Baptist history and you will discover that it was in the formation of a commitment to Christian education that the anti-missionary spirit was overcome. We have largely lost our connection to those roots. In so doing, we have lost our bearings. And what has become of us? In a work that began together, a great divide has emerged between missions and education, with enormous tension between the priests and scribes. But unless the preachers and the teachers, the priests and the scribes, the men and women of letters, and the men and women of the spirit can sit down together, our cooperative efforts, be they a convention or a fellowship, will flounder in a sea of pettiness and triviality. Evangelism that is content to paint "Jesus Saves" on all the rocks in public parks will fail. Education that presumes to separate the mind from the spirit will fail. Witness that is uninformed and uncaring will fail.

Missions and evangelism desperately need resources of education, and education desperately needs the power and the presence of honest faith. My journey has taught me that churches and denominations speak of Christian education, but their real passion is for college football. But being Baptist has taught me that we cannot separate missions and education. We cannot separate thinking and believing.

Just as a denomination can lose the soul of being Baptist, a Baptist college or university or seminary can surely abandon their Baptist heritage. For our Baptist schools, it has been a double siege, a double-edged sword. There is the siege of those without who want to control our schools, to mandate our textbooks, to prescribe creeds to which teachers must give assent.

On both fronts, we cannot be a good Baptist university, a good Baptist college, or a good Baptist seminary if either siege prevails. Within our institutions, we must bear witness to our faith and make clear to our students that the real trouble of our world is not that people don`t know enough. It is that they are not good enough.

From without, we must overcome the fear of open inquiry and intellectual freedom. The mind and the spirit are not in conflict. We need not be defensive. God needs no defense and truth will be its own protection.

Now permit me a final word about my journey. For me, being a Baptist by faith and being an educator by vocation, converges in Mercer`s decision to undertake theological education.

My journey of faith and my journey of learning have come together as we join hands with Baptists to create a new Baptist School of Theology.

At Mercer, our journey has brought us here because it is where we began in 1833. Jesse Mercer said that he was beginning a university in order to influence and to foster "pious intelligence." So, Jesse Mercer`s lamp, Jesse Mercer`s vision, has become a light for our path in 1995.

Piety means knowing that you cannot understand your life and that I cannot understand my life without reference to God. Piety means finding life`s center. Piety is not sentimental or foolish. It is not about public prayer or giving out tracts. Piety is about finding a guiding light for our path. Piety means finding the purity of heart to will one thing. You and I are many people. We are distracted and scattered among many allegiances. Piety means finding a center for devotion that can bring order and meaning out of the chaos of our lives.

Yet, piety alone is not enough. A School of Theology should bring piety and thought together. The mind is a gift of God. Any notion that being devout means to turn away from thought is a caricature of truth and holiness. Speaking without thought leads to arrogant ignorance. Arrogance and ignorance are a lethal combination. It will numb the mind and kill the spirit.

So I say, let us never fear the search for truth. Let the teachers teach and let the preachers preach. God`s truth will prevail.

Education that is controlled and limited by creedal boundaries is not education at all. Education that has been purified in the sieve of doctrinaire orthodoxy is not education at all. It is not even good training. We want to build a school where people can teach without fear of doctrinal listeners outside the door and where students can study without fear of intimidation and religious demagoguery.

Mercer University is beginning this School of Theology for four reasons:

1. We believe that the demise and takeover of the Baptist seminaries by the denominational mafia is a moral outrage.
2. We believe that theological education must be free and open, intellectually honest and faithful, or it is not worthy to be called education at all.
3. We have listened to Baptists. Mercer University was founded by Baptists, nurtured by Baptists, and we must serve Baptists in the education of preachers and priests. It is our calling to prepare persons to proclaim the gospel in Jesus` name.
4. We have a new vision of theological education. We have established this School, not to replicate Southern Seminary or Southeastern Seminary but here among the heart of Baptists, to create and to sustain a new vision for theological education.

Ours is a vision that reaches across the boundaries of thought and experience of clergy and laity. We will seek to educate men and women who can serve our churches with the passion of faith and the integrity of thought. We are aiming to bring up a new generation of pastors and church leaders who love the Church, who understand the Bible, and who are devoted followers of Jesus Christ.

One final lesson I have learned from my Baptist journey is that we do not go alone. The best evidence that God is with us is that we hold on to one another.

I believe that if we hold onto one another, God will be with us and we will find our way to the Promised Land. There will be twists and turns. There will be sharp curves and steep hills. We will stumble and someone will have to pick us up and brush us off But if we walk together and follow God`s light, we will find the Promised Land where faith and learning can stand together. And we will be Baptists, not because we believe the same doctrine, but because we serve the same Lord.

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