People of the One Book

During the 1970s the Southern Baptist Convention found itself facing a crisis that had divided every other major protestant denomination.  The Presbyterians, the Methodists, and the latest had been the Lutherans with nearly half of the denomination breaking away to form the Lutheran Church of America Missouri Synod anew  group that held tenatiously to the old doctrines that their denomination turned away from, the major one in particular was the inerrancy and authority of Holy Scripture.  Like those denominations, Southern Baptists had seen their Seminaries, (the headwaters of training for young ministers), dominated by men who no longer held to the Baptist Confession of Faith that declared the Bible to be “truth without any mixture of error”.  These professors were teaching students that the Bible was inspired and true in matters of faith, but obviously contained errors due to the fallability of its human authors.  Commentaries written by seminary professors began to declare the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myth, on the level of Babylonian Creation mythology.  Even though it should not be taken as literally true, it can serve the purpose of helping us understand their ancient views, even if they were not scientifically accurate.  After all the Bible is a book about Salvation, not a Science textbook.  This Broadman Commentary set, published in 1969, caused a firestorm in the convention.  Add to this the fact that the Sunday School Board   had delegated the writing of much of the Sunday School materials to these professors and laymen in our Churches then saw the truth that Pastors were experiencing by going to Southern Baptist Colleges and Seminaries. The 1970 Southern Baptist Convention in Denver, Colorado was so controversial, my Pastor at Salem Baptist Church in Decatur, Russell Pittman could tolerate it no more.  He led the Church to choose to leave the Southern Baptist Convention and become Independent Baptist, which they remain to this day!

What would happen?  Paul Powell, W.A. Criswell, Paige Patterson, and Judge Paul Pressler studied Southern Baptist polity and saw that the trend could be turned over time.  It did not develop overnight and would not be corrected overnight without causing a division in our Great denomination.  In 1979, at the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston, Texas, W.A. Criswell  welcomed the convention, and did something unprecedented – he encouraged the messengers to elect Adrian Rogers, Pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church as President of the Convention.  Dr. Rogers was an unapologetically committed to the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures.  The Convention, and yours truly in attendance, did that and started a process that was the only way to save our denomination.  Below is a list of elected Presidents:

These men were all believers in the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures.  They appointed men to the Committee on Committee who appointed new trustees to our Seminaries and Boards as they rotated off.  These conservative men only appointed trustees who believed in Inerrancy and would require our professors to teach what our Confession of Faith teaches.  Some professors retired or quit.  Others were fired!  In the end our Convention was saved, and we have continued in the proud tradition of a denomination has honored God by holding tenaciously to an Infallable Inerrant Word of God as our rule of faith and practice.  It was so exciting to Pastor and live through that history making unprecedented saving of a convention from the liberalism that had been growing since the early 1900’s.  Today I begin a series of messages affirming why we believe in some of the fundamentals of our faith.  Today we will affirm Why we believe in the Bible as we vow to be “People of the One Book”