THE BAPTIST IN ALL OF US

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  A thought came to me this morning from my grandfather, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher who was mean, yet never cruel, and who believed that only Baptists went to heaven.

It was a thought, but it comes to me as a voice from the past. 

We all have the voices of our relatives, ministers, teachers, coaches, and other significant adults in our heads.  As we grow older, the addition of children and friends can make our minds into one crowded room, a raucous cacophony of the past, especially if all the voices are clamoring at the same time.

Fortunately, mine is a disciplined mind that has the stronger voice of my Self musing to a listening me who considers what is being mused.  Occasionally, however, that Self''s voice sounds a lot like my grandfather.

It happened a few minutes before I began writing this post. 

So please indulge me as I write a little about Granddaddy.

My grandfather attended Southern Baptist seminary after returning home from the Philippines during World War II.  

I surmise that at that time, landmarkism was still lingering as an influential force among Baptist professors and students.

I surmise this because my grandfather was a landmarkist.  He believed what James Graves taught in the late 19th Century: Baptists are the true New Testament church on earth. 

Baptists only preach the gospel and "get it right" while everyone else "gets it wrong."

Furthermore, the only baptism recognized by God happens in a Baptist church.

This might be the place where a lot of Baptists got lost.  While Methodists were saving people, Baptists were saving souls. What made Billy Graham a great preacher, in the minds of many Baptists, was that he saved souls. 

If the souls saved died soon thereafter of malnutrition, well... it's on them!

To save souls, the words you use to communicate your message are crucial.  The words must be true and come straight out of the (KJV) New Testament.  

Of course, the evidence that you were saved was that you attended a Baptist church, you believed a flat earth theology, and you practiced droll piety until you nearly perfected it. 

This kind of Christianity was about going to heaven, as if any of us had a say in that possibility!  It was not about revealing our God of love in the way we treat other people.

It preached transformation:  from a person who was lost and going to hell into a person who is saved and going to heaven.

It did not preach this transformation: from people who love imperfectly into people through whom God loves.

I think my grandfather believed that John the Baptist was the first Baptist.  I recall also that he believed the King James Version of the Bible was not only inspired, but the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts may have been retroactively translated from the KJV.

That voice about Baptists being the only way to God came back to me this morning.  

I tend to scoff at such notions:  Only way to God, indeed! 

How anybody can think that way after reading theology, studying the Bible, and living in a world informed by science?  
It strikes me as peculiar.

Theology today is so much better than it was when brothers and sisters believed God lived in the sky and the stars were lights, not suns.  Biblical studies are so much better now that we have scientific ways to compare texts, and we link history to the literature of the Bible.

Indeed, science has done us all a favor by extricating superstition from our faith.  In the past, the Reformers believed transubstantiation and indulgences were superstitions based on reason and on textual interpretation.

The Reformers and Radical Reformers did not see their own superstitions.

I am a Baptist.  I come from the Radical Reformation tradition.  Worse still, I am a Southern Baptist.  An ordained Southern Baptist minister, no less!  I come from a tradition that began over the acceptance of slavery.  

Few denominations are as heavily laden with superstition and ignorance as mine.

I ask myself often, why am I a Baptist?  I have admired the Anglican Church for decades.  Since Pope Francis received the vote, I admire Catholicism.  Both of those traditions are rich in history and wisdom.

Here's why: there's a simplicity that defines what a Baptist is.  
That simplicity exists as a hope for all believers.  I am hopelessly drawn to that.

We love religious liberty; at least we did before the larger part of us who are Southern Baptists started acting like moral and spiritual inquisitors.  

However, being a Baptist is knowing that all people have the right to believe whatever their conscience tells them.  Why? 

Because we Baptists believe in the competency of the person to make up his or her own mind, since our God of love comes to each of us and loves each of us in God's unique way.  

So let's say I'm an atheist, right?  Then our God of love is coming to me as no God at all and loving me, keeping me, and beatifying me as mysteriously as if I were any other person of faith.

So being an atheist is okay.  By talking or writing books about no God, I am talking about God, nonetheless, and thereby talking with God.

I love religious liberty.  It's spare, so I'll keep it.  It's spare, so I have more fun appreciating the diverse flourishes all peoples of faith create in their worship.

Who am I to say they are merely flourishes?

Blessings...