Religion: Defending the Baptist Faith

The literal truth of the Bible is the bedrock of faith for Southern Baptists. But lately, in some Baptist seminaries, scholars have been cautiously moving toward the Biblical criticism accepted by most other Protestant denominations, which suggests that parts of Holy Scripture are symbolically valid but literally impossible. Last week in San Francisco, "messengers" (delegates) to the annual convention of the fast-growing church (around 10 million) firmly repudiated the seminarians. By overwhelming standing vote, the convention passed one resolution that reaffirmed the faith of the church in "the entire [the resolution's italics] Bible as the authoritative, authentic, infallible word of God," another that ordered trustees and officials of the six Baptist seminaries to waste no time in stamping out "theological viewswhich would undermine faith in the historical accuracy and doctrinal integrity of the Bible."

Most notable case in point was Dr.Ralph Elliott, a professor at the Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City.

Last summer the Baptist-run Broadman Press published Elliott's The Message of Genesis, an exegetical study of some of the more cautious judgments of other Protestant Biblical scholarship; for example, that the Flood covered only a few miles of the Middle East rather than the entire world, and that Adam might well be a symbolic term for all mankind rather than a specific human being. "This sort of rationalistic criticism." rumbled Houston Pastor K. Owen White, "can lead only to further confusion, unbelief, deterioration and ultimate disintegration of a great New Testament denomination." But not every Baptist preacher was happy about the resolutions. Dr. Wallace Bassett of Dallas warned that they would make Southern Baptist churches "the laughingstock of the Christian world."