An interesting letter that made us think…

Attn. David R. Currie:

I was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1929, and I started school in a Roman Catholic school. It was the beginning of the Great Depression. As I grew, poverty was my brother, hunger was my neighbor and war became my teacher. As a teenager in the city of Chicago, I lived through many difficulties. I was unhealthy and almost died twice.

As a skinny runt, I was the brunt of many jokes and abuses. As a Catholic I was suppressed in my thinking and expression. Religious law was legislated against every action. I could not even read the Bible - Only priests were allowed and they did not. My father was becoming an alcoholic and he became abusive to me as well, but the War made his presence scarce and he had to stay sober. I was the second son of five boys and we lived for much of my life in 1 1/2 rooms; no toilet, no hot water and no privacy. I could have easily become paranoid except for an intervention of a strange kind.

One day, when my father took his paycheck and went out on a drunken spree as he often did, and he ended up in jail. My mother could do nothing, but a lady from the Pacific Garden Mission bailed my dad out and spoke to my mother’s Catholic heart. It launched our family into a new era. My mother and I were baptized later, in a General Baptist Church, and I attended there for several years. Sunday School was like the taste of manna, but even there I was paranoid because of my lack of knowledge among kids who had been raised in the church. Never the less, my family made a complete change and we ultimately moved to Texas as I was returning from Korea in 1952.

As a result of my profession of faith, I no longer felt that I was being told what to think, but I was taught to use my mind freely. My friends became supportive instead of abusive. My body and mind were being fed and I was constantly hungry. My Dad recovered from alcoholism, though he did not profess Christianity until he was 67. I was graduated from a technical high school in Chicago in the top 25% of my class.

After graduation my education was interrupted by Korea and did not get back to my education for 3 years. I was learning many exciting things due to my Christian freedom, some things were good and others not so good, but I just let God sort things out for me as we walked together. As a result of what I learned and my freedom to think on my own, I became an honor graduate with a BSME and a minor in Nuclear Engineering attending universities in Texas.

My years in Texas Baptist Churches prepared me for a role I hardly expected. In 1960, my wife, son and I moved to California and served in struggling Baptist Churches for 35 years. For 30 years, in California, I served my country in nuclear research until my retirement in 1990. Concurrently, I had been a Bible teacher and have recently returned to Texas in 1995 to continue teaching the Bible.

Things have changed during those years! That Roman Catholic boy with his new found freedom must now look back on his spiritual growth with a dichotomy of feelings. Was that experience a farce? Was what I learned a mere deception? Is the priesthood of the believer a hoax taught to me by misleaders of the flock? Why did Jesus say, “When I make you free, you shall be free indeed?”

Through a process of considerable study I had learned that I was free to make my own personal interpretation. Even free to make my own mistakes. The scriptures told me I was accountable to no one except the Holy Spirit who would be my teacher. Now, why am I now being told that the pastor is the only authority by some radicals? That reeks of authoritarianism. Am I to expect that I must soon kiss the ring of a Baptist Pope, or submit to a committee of Baptist Cardinals?

For one who has traveled far in the service of the Southern Baptist Convention, I am deeply pained. Why do we former Catholics convert people into a system that is on the threshold of being a greater coercive power than the one we left? I am reminded of the words of a black man who was abused and beaten by the Los Angeles police, “Why can’t we just get along?”

Why do we destroy our ministry with character assassinations, innuendos, McCarthyism, purges, ad hominem attacks and name calling. When I went to college that kind of abuse was regarded as being a product of small minds, not great hearts.

I love to teach people who have inquisitive minds, but I do not require that they believe everything that I say. I just ask them to think. Since I am a scientist I like the words of Einstein, “We have to learn to ask simple questions, and when we hear simple answers we can hear God talking to us.”

After one of my class members had been gone for eight years, I received a telephone call from him. He asked me if I remembered teaching a certain principle and I said yes. Then he told me that he did not get it when I presented it and had discounted it for eight years. Then he suddenly realized that what I said was valid and wanted to talk to me about it.

We spoke for over a half hour and he really blessed my heart. If I must now live under a totalitarian Baptist system how can I possibly challenge the minds of my class members? How can we possibly raise up a generation of great minds if they cannot be allowed to think?

Demagogues are everywhere now. They demand obedience to creeds which are replete in Catholic history and which were discarded in the Reformation Period. Auto-de-fes were the answer of the Spanish Inquisition and it would seem that we Baptists, who suffered under these processes in the past, would be the most resistant to further terrorism.

Unfortunately, we have not learned as much as we think we have learned. The Catholics of 16th Century Europe started private schools to purify their children, as we do now. But isolationism does not win people to Christ. I raised my children in public schools so that they could deal with the world, not run from it. They are each servants of the Lord in their communities in California. What does the future hold for kids who grow up thinking they know it all because they were isolated from sin? Instead of demanding federal funding for schools we ought to be fighting it with every bit of our strength.

Maybe I have been living a Baptist hypocrisy. Maybe the Catholics were right; the lay mind is not capable of being their own priesthood. But if we submit to that where does the authority come from? We know that there are those who will jump into the void and enslave us. That has always been a human propensity. I submit that if we do not treasure that freedom enough to defend it in a Christ-like spirit, we have a most miserable future.

Jesus did not submit to the repression of religious dogma. Resisting cost Him his life. I submit that we are not called to defend the faith, as some would suggest. We are called to proclaim it and share it.

The tragedy of failure is ghastly. Think about what will happen if we give over our freedom to fundamentalists. Purges will be everywhere, and every item of literature will be screened for religious/political accuracy. Many churches will be split into factions an some will go under due to the loss of financial support. Attendance at conventions will be restricted to conformists. There will be no second chance to return to our heroic past. The rules will change such that there will be no possibility. Those who are using our Baptist freedoms will deny them to you.

I do believe we must fight fundamentalism, but I do not expect them to change. They will never think like we do. It is like asking the religious fundamentalists of Iran to yield their power. We can either learn to ‘get along’ or get out. I am not sure that we as cooperating and committed Baptists ‘en masse’ really understand the consequences of failure. Fundamentalists have three things going for them:

1) They deal in absolutes whether they are right or wrong. The ignorant are always prey to absolute power.

2) They will keep the pressure on because their followers live in fear of truth and are denied the right to think. They parrot propaganda without a thought as to what they are doing.

3) Those of us who enjoy freedom want to embrace every faction and give them free speech.

That could be our undoing. If we lose the battle we may try to ‘get along’ on their terms, but every day we do we will lose more support until we have no voice at all. They know that. In that process many of our people will be brainwashed by their literature weekly and will gradually adjust their thinking until they become mindless automatons.

I tend to think that a fall-back plan must be developed that will instantly create a Baptist organization outside of the SBC. At least we can then demonstrate that our ideas work better than theirs. Lacking that, I fear the future. If we fail, we will be no better off than Jesus was as a reformer of the Jewish system. He had to start over with a new Church.

John E. Field, PNE, Mansfield, TX

June 1997