Baptist Confessions of Faith
By Don Gordon

Recently one of my church members loaned a marvelous book to me about the making of the King James Version of the Bible. Aptly titled God’s Secretaries, Adam Nicolson creates a riveting narrative about the personalities and procedures used to produce the most revered Bible ever translated into English.

Nicolson recounts the six companies, made up of nine scholars each, which would be God’s secretaries in creating the KJV of the Bible. The leaders of the companies were deliberately chosen from different institutions, often at theological odds with one another: Westminster, Cambridge, and Oxford. These schools held varying loyalties to King James vision for the Church of England.

These diverse groups of translators were then required to check each others work. Individual work on specific books of the Bible would be filtered through the company. The company’s work covering a series of books in the Bible would be reviewed by the other five companies. Finally, all the companies would hammer out any unresolved differences.

Nicolson says this process created “an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace.” Today, little is known about this rigorous process, but all English-speaking Christians would agree that God inspired and providentially guided this sacred work. It was a work, as we have come to see, grounded in rich diversity. God’s secretaries produced an English masterpiece, an inspired version of God’s Word that has been embraced by many Christians holding a wide array of theological views.

Baptists, despite their rich diversity, have traditionally trusted one another to faithfully interpret and apply the Bible in their local settings. For nearly 150 years “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” was maintained among Southern Baptist because of our high levels of trust. But much has changed in Baptist life, particularly among Southern Baptists.

The Southern Baptist Convention, founded in 1845, did not adopt its first confession of faith until eighty years later. That fact, in itself, demonstrates the ability of Baptists to thrive without a formal confession.

In 1925 the first Baptist Faith and Message, was adopted in Memphis, Tennessee in response to the fundamentalist movement and controversy surrounding the theory of evolution. E.Y. Mullins, then President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, chaired the committee that drafted the confession. The report submitted to the convention and overwhelmingly adopted did not include any particular statement about evolution or processes God used in creating the world. It deliberately affirmed the supernatural creation of the world without adopting divisive theories to explain God’s activity. It was a confession of faith created by a diverse body of Baptist leaders and adopted by a people who desired peace within the convention.

A similar climate occurred a generation later, which led to the adoption of a new Baptist Faith and Message in 1963 in Kansas City, Missouri.

This time the catalyst for creating a new confession of faith was the commentary on Genesis by Ralph Elliott, a professor who had been dismissed from Midwestern Seminary in 1962. Elliott had advanced what some considered unacceptable views of biblical inspiration.

Herschel Hobbs, considered by many to be the most influential Baptist theologian of the latter half of the twentieth century, chaired the committee to do the work. The committee was comprised of the presidents of affiliated state conventions of that time.

The 1963 Baptist Faith and Message was similar to the 1925 BFM in many ways, including no provision on specific doctrines of biblical inspiration. It affirmed the truth of the Bible “without any mixture of error, for its matter.”

Like the 1925 confession, it successfully achieved one of its primary objectives of nurturing peace within the convention. Both the 1925 and 1963 confessions included the important warning in their preambles: “Such statements have never been regarded as complete, infallible statements of faith, nor as official creeds carrying mandatory authority.”

The recent edition of the Baptist Faith and Message adopted by the SBC in 2000 breaks the mold of historic Baptist confessions. For the first time in its history, a confession of faith was described by its authors as a “tool for doctrinal accountability.”

Prior to this dramatic reversal of Baptist confessions, Southern Baptist groups had bent over backwards to avoid the appearance of creedalism. They sought to produce and adopt confessions that broadened the tent rather than shrink it. The authors adopted language that was weighty, filled with richness that invited differing groups to support it, in order to enhance the unity of the convention.

Sadly, the recent firings of experienced, loyal, and dedicated missionaries have exposed this new creedal spirit in Baptist life. Indeed, the BFM 2000 has become a tool for doctrinal accountability to weed out faithful servants of Christ who cannot in good conscience sign a creed.

Mainstream Baptists of North Carolina are offering an alternative to this emerging path of creedalism and overly strict biblical boundaries. We will support candidates and causes which promise involvement by a wider group of Baptists. We will affirm our historic beliefs in Jesus Christ and the Bible without promoting creeds. We will offer and utilize leadership that affirms our historic and important relationships with our Baptists institutions and agencies.

In a climate rife with possibilities for chaos, we will struggle to “integrate differences” among North Carolina Baptists in an open manner. We will attempt, in the words of the KJV of the Bible, “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (

4:3).

Don Gordon is pastor of Yates Baptist Church, Durham, NC

October 2003