The recommendations of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) Study Committee for a new edition of the historic document incorporate portions of the 1925 and 1963 editions, with some revisions but no new articles, according to Adrian Rogers, chairman of the committee. Observers termed the changes “significant but not wholesale.”
Included in the revisions is an addition to Article VI: The Church, which the committee said the office of pastor is limited to men.
The BF&M Study Committee was authorized by messengers to the 1999 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Atlanta. The convention authorized President Paige Patterson to name a committee to review the historic document and report back to the 2000 annual meeting. The 15-person committee met a number of times in the past year.
The SBC first adopted the BF&M in 1925 as a public statement of Southern Baptists’ faith and doctrine. Nearly 40 years later, faced with new challenges and questions, Rogers said, the convention adopted a revised edition of the BF&M in 1963.
“Now, again nearly 40 years after the convention’s last comprehensive action, a new generation must take up the stewardship of the faith ‘once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3).
Recommended changes in the “Baptist Faith and Message” include:
- The Scriptures. The new language describes the Holy Bible as “God’s revelation of himself to man.” The 1963 version called it “the record” of God’s revelation. That subtle distinction allowed one to affirm the statement without embracing the view of biblical inerrancy, which views the whole Bible as literally true.
While the new article doesn’t use the word “inerrancy,” as some expected, it retains the 1963 description of “truth, without any mixture of error” for the Bible’s matter. It then adds a sentence elaborating: “Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”
The new statement on Scripture deletes a final sentence from the 1963 version that said, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.” That language has “been subject to misunderstanding,” Rogers said.
Equal importance
Some have used that language to mean parts of the Bible, such as the teachings of Jesus, carry more weight than other parts, such as when God orders Joshua to destroy everything when the Israelites invade Palestine.
“Jesus Christ cannot be divided from the biblical revelation that is testimony to Him,” Rogers said. “Scripture cannot be set against Scripture.”
- God. New language describes God as “all powerful and all knowing.” God’s knowledge extends, the statement says, “to all things, past present and future, including the future decisions of his free creatures.”
The phrase challenges in part a controversial “openness of God” theology, which views God as engaging in mutual relationships with lost people that have no guaranteed outcome. Hence, God does not always know what will occur and even changes His mind if events warrant it.
The wording also resonates with Calvinism, a theological view that is gaining popularity among some Southern Baptists, by emphasizing God’s foreknowledge of future events. It stops short, however, of the Calvinist belief that God actually predetermines those events, including who will and will not be saved.
- Christ. A subsection on “God the Son” adds a word describing Christ’s death on the cross as “substitutionary.”
“Substitutionary atonement” is one of several historic views explaining how Christ’s crucifixion is effective in God’s forgiveness of sin. It holds that humans are separated by their sins from a holy God, but a sinless Christ offered Himself to suffer God’s wrath in their place. The view is one of five “fundamentals” of the faith that describe classic fundamentalism. Other views suggest Christ’s willingness to suffer and die illustrate God’s great love for humanity but that Jesus did not strictly have to die in order for God to forgive sins.
- The Holy Spirit. In another sub-section of the article on God, the statement adds the Holy Spirit “at the moment of regeneration … baptizes every believer into the Body of Christ.” That counters the view of some charismatic Christians, that salvation and a subsequent infilling or “baptism” of the Spirit are separate events, the latter often manifested by speaking in tongues.
- Salvation. A new sentence proclaims, “There is no salvation apart from personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.”
Southern Baptists have in recent months been criticized for targeting evangelistic efforts at Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists.
- The church. The new statement repeats earlier language describing the scriptural offices in a local congregation as pastors and deacons. It now specifies, however, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
The Sabbath
- The Lord’s Day. While tightening several doctrinal stances, the new statement softens Southern Baptists’ view of the Sabbath. Previous statements on the Lord’s Day called for “refraining from worldly amusements and resting from secular employments.”
The revised statement says, “Activities on the Lord’s Day should be commensurate with the Christian’s conscience under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”
- Evangelism. The previous statement described every Christian’s duty to seek to win the lost by “personal effort” and other methods. The new one goes further, urging “verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle.”
- Christians and the social order. Perhaps the most obvious changes in the entire document are expansions in a list of social concerns to opposition of racism, “all forms of sexual immorality, including adultery, homosexuality and pornography,” abortion and euthanasia.
No substantive changes are recommended in nine of the remaining articles. An article on “Man” adds a notation that the “gift of gender is … part of the goodness of creation.”
The new document omits mention of “the soul’s competency before God, freedom in religion and the priesthood of the believer” that was in a preamble to the 1963 statement.
Herschel Hobbs, the primary author of the 1963 document, described the preamble as its most important part, because it clarifies the statement is not intended as a creed.
(Compiled from wire services)
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