Liberty Of Conscience: More On Bill Leonard And Baptists

See: Mainstream Baptist: Reasserting, Reinterpreting, and Reforming Baptist Identity: "At the CBF General Assembly"

Highlights from the above post:

I wholeheartedly agree with Leonard's concerns about the Baptist movement, but I was too busy preparing for the Norman New Baptist Covenant meeting to respond at that time. Now, in a series of blogs, I plan to offer my suggestions for Baptist Identity in the 21st Century.

I would begin by reasserting the Baptist emphasis on liberty of conscience. Baptists began by dissenting from the established church and asserting their right to a free conscience on matters of religion. Our appeals for liberty of conscience were made on behalf of all people and not for ourselves alone. 78 years before the enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote his first Letter Concerning Toleration, Thomas Helwys was writing:

Men's religion to God is between God and themselves; the king shall not answer for it, neither may the king judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.

45 years before Locke said it was "necessary above all to distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between the church and the commonwealth," Roger Williams warned that whenever "a gap" was opened "in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself . . . and made his garden a wilderness."

While John Locke could never bring himself to extend religious toleration to Catholics and atheists, revolutionary era Baptist evangelist John Leland boldly asserted:

Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three gods, no god, or twenty gods, and let government protect him in so doing

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Bill Leonard: Baptists must find new ways to express ideals

This is good---thanks Vick:

Leonard: Baptists must find new ways to express ideals
By Robert Dilday & Ken Camp
Published: July 07, 2009

HOUSTON (ABP)—Baptist denominational systems across the United States are in transition and being redefined, spawning a number of issues that are complicating and clouding the Baptist landscape, Bill Leonard told a group of Associated Baptist Press supporters.

And those issues have implications for communicators who “write, blog and broadcast for and about Baptists in the years ahead,” said Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Leonard spoke at the annual “Friends of ABP” dinner, held in conjunction with the general assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

“The once-formidable Baptist presence in the United States retains its significant numerical dominance in American Protestantism, but the demographics ... reflect a denomination in a considerable decline, torn by internal controversies on one side and megachurch competition on the other, held together by an aging constituency, faltering finances and turbulent identity crises,” said Leonard.

Shaken by the changing nature of religious life in 21st century American culture, Baptist systems are “coming apart, being re-defined, in dynamic transition, disconnecting, in disarray, being reclaimed, collapsing or experience unending schism,” he added.

Among the indicators:

• Transitions in American—and Southern—culture are now “normative” in Baptist communities. “A new generation of Baptist clergy and laity find themselves working and worshiping together in new and creative ways in changing neighborhoods, interracial marriage, community organizing and of course the election of President Obama,” said Leonard.

• Denominations—including Baptist ones—matter less and less to religious Americans. “Both the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches this very year were given new proposals for reorganizing cumbersome denominational structures that inhibit rather than enable ministry possibilities and funding realities,” said Leonard. Baptist churches and their associated networks have settled into a “de facto society method not unlike that of earlier Baptist organizations.”

• Most moderate Baptist organizations—including the Alliance of Baptists, the CBF and Texas Baptists Committed—have “reached a plateau numerically and financially.”

• Many Baptist churches are “renegotiating their ‘Baptistness’ and their connections with old denominational identities.” Technological changes increasingly allow local congregations to function effectively without relying on denominational resources. “Some Baptists, left and right of center, observe that ‘brand-name’ religion no longer attracts.”

• Because Baptists under the age of 45 are unfamiliar with intact denominational systems, they increasingly reject sectarian divisions for a generic Christianity that is “part denominational, part contemporary church, part emerging church, part postmodern church,” he said. “If Baptist identity is to be carried beyond mid-century, it must be reasserted and reinterpreted and reformed immediately.”

• Years of controversy about the Bible and control have left other theological problems unexamined, said Leonard. “Obsession with theories of biblical authority ... have often obscured serious questions of ... how the text is interpreted,” he said. And developments in evangelistic theology have left “many Baptists uncertain as to what conversion means, how it is experienced and what is the most effective means for declaring the gospel.”

Those indicators of Baptist transition could evoke several responses from the denomination’s adherents, noted Leonard. Baptists might:

• Choose between their heritage of dissent or their more recent role as upholders of the establishment. “Many conservative Baptists cannot seem to decide if they are dissenters, standing against the secularism that they believe to be the unofficial religious establishment of an increasingly anti-religious nation, or establishmentarians, demanding a certain kind of religious privilege for their way of believing in a historically ‘Christian’ nation,” said Leonard. “Moderate/liberal Baptists are so uncertain about their past and future that they can’t seem to decide what, when or if to protest anything at all.”

• Find in their history keys to responding to a postmodern world. “In a sense, our (Baptist) forebears invented pluralism; they helped invent congregational localism; they understood conversion as linking God’s story with each individual’s story and linking it to a community of stories, made public in a healing, cleansing ritual. Can you be more postmodern than that?” asked Leonard.

• Recast their idea of religious pluralism and how to engage it. “Pluralism does not mean ... a blending of religious traditions in some nebulous attempt at tolerance,” said Leonard. “Yet pluralism may force us to ask what we mean by the nature of our witness and the tone of our voice.”

• Respond to the “connectionalism of media—a communications network that reconnects old communities and facilitates new ones,” said Leonard. “Efforts by ABP to anticipate these changes and move toward a multimedia approach are to be complimented and must move ahead with haste.”

• Learn to live out a “responsibility of the minority”—something Baptists worldwide have known for four centuries, said Leonard. “We have an opportunity to recover a lost witness in a society where our voice may not be privileged but it must be heard, where we rediscover the power of witness in a society ... that pays less and less attention.”

Earlier in the day, Leonard had touched on some of the same themes in a workshop on 400 years of Baptist history he led in tandem with James Dunn, resident professor of Christianity and public policy at Wake Forest School of Divinity.

(Read more: Here).

What It Means To Be Baptist

My new Facebook friend, David Harmon-Vaught, recently posted this article on Facebook:

Give me those old-time Baptists
By Joe Phelps • Special to The Courier-Journal • June 10, 2009

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Minister and gadfly Will Campbell, speaking at a Baptist college chapel, asked "How many of you are old-time Baptists?" Hands went up across the chapel. "How many would serve on a jury?" Again, hands went up. "How many would fight in a war if asked?" Hands quickly rose. "How many believe in capital punishment?" Same result.
Campbell then observed, "Old-time Baptists, those from the 16th and 17th centuries, wouldn't do any of those things." He paused. "Students, you're not old-time Baptists, you're 1950's Baptists."
Baptists come in all flavors and sizes. With the Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering taking place in Louisville later this month, and with a recent SBC vice-president saying in an interview that he prays for the death of President Obama, it is timely to recite the old adage, "No Baptist speaks for another." I don't speak for them, and they surely don't speak for me.
Sometimes it's hard to be a Baptist, or at least to admit it in good company. Our caricatures aren't pretty.
But this year is the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Baptist movement within the Christian faith, which seems a fitting time to reflect on "old-time Baptists" and to celebrate the contribution of Baptists to the global religious landscape; namely, our advocacy for uncoerced faith grounded in the right of conscience and the inevitability of dissent from either the government or any religious hierarchy.
Like many of our American freedoms, religious liberty seems an obvious, even innocuous right to us today. But Baptists were born in a day when freedom to declare one's belief or disbelief was prohibited by the laws of the land. Baptists refused to yield to the assumption that faith could be co-opted and exploited by the state. Faith, or no faith, was too sacred to be simply a precondition of citizenship.
You may have been taught that the Puritans came to the New World for religious liberty. In fact, early settlers came for their religious liberty from England, but not necessarily for others. State sanctioned religion was still in vogue, just Puritan state-sanctioned religion.

Read More: Here.

See also:

Why I Am a Baptist
By Professor Walter Rauschenbusch

Prelude
Baptists emphasize the primacy of personal Christian experience
Baptists practice democracy in our organized church lift
Baptists insist that a Christ-like lift, not ritual, characterizes true worship and pure religion
Baptists tolerate no creed the Bible alone is sufficient authority/or our faith and practice
POSTLUDE