A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE:
When the Ghosts Show Up
By David R. Currie
Executive Director

It is well known that I love baseball and like many I was hoping for a Cubs/Red Sox world series but alas the “curses” were too much to overcome.

I used to be a Yankee fan but now I like to root for the little guy. Yet, I admit admiration for the Yankee franchise. There is no one else like them in sports. They have won twenty-six world championships in the 20th century.

After Aaron Boone hit the 11th inning home run to beat the Red Sox, he was interviewed and said, “Jeter kept saying, just wait till the ghosts show up.” What a great comment.

Of course, Derek Jeter was referring to the fact that they were playing at Yankee Stadium, the same place that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle had played and won so many times before. The “ghosts” would show up and carry the Yankees to victory.

Hebrews 11 recalls the “cloud of witnesses” that gave inspiration to the early church. These “balcony people,” were people the writer of Hebrews cited as examples of faith. The ultimate “inspiration” was Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith” whom the writer said we should consider “so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (Hebrews 12:1-3).

I draw a great strength from remembering the “cloud of witnesses” in Baptist life, from Roger Williams, John Leland, William Carey, Lottie Moon, J.L.M. Curry, George Truett, Carlyle Marney, Nat Tracy, T.B. Maston and many others.

I draw a great strength from the living heroes whom I do not want to let down; from the young ministers that have shown courageous leadership at an early age; from my own family that has always supported me; and from the missionaries who refused to sign the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message even though it cost them their livelihood.

What makes these “cloud of witnesses,” past and present so special to me? They are all REAL Baptists: champions of Baptist principles and practices.

These persons have lived their lives with their eyes “fixed on Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2). They have all been champions of soul liberty and religious freedom. They have all been “church” people. They have championed “local church autonomy.”

But more than anything, my “cloud of witnesses” has been the champion of the “priesthood of the believer.” It seems to me, that the abandonment of this biblical principle by the Southern Baptist Convention is the most blatant of all “sins against our Baptist heritage.”

Morris Chapman, president of the SBC Executive Committee was quoted in the Waco Tribune-Herald on October 25 saying: “”I don’t know how simple faith has become so difficult to communicate,” said Chapman. “The authority of God’s word is settled. Our challenge as Southern Baptists, when we encounter something, is to ask ‘Is this the Word of God?’ and not to interpret.”

Jerry Rankin wrote a missionary couple urging them to sign the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message in which he said, “Your position of disagreeing with practically every revision reflects a broader problem of unwillingness to understand and accept the interpretations and biblical authority on which these statements of faith were based.”

Rankin also said that to call the 2000 BF&M a “man-made document is to belittle the divinely-led process of local churches and denominations seeking and determining God’s will collectively.”

I love my “cloud of witnesses,” and feel the “ghosts show up” when I am speaking and usually when I am writing. I believe in the church, both locally and universally, and value the interpretations of many in the past and the present. But I will never, ever, give up my right to interpret the Bible individually. I was saved by a personal response to the living Christ and I will interpret Scripture under the Lordship of Christ and out of my personal relationship with the living Christ.

I think the “ghosts” and the present “cloud of witnesses” are smiling as I write this because they feel the same way. They became examples of faith by individually following Christ and not giving in to “collective” pressure.

November 2003