Bickering Baptists

The sturdiest pulpits of Middle America stand in the 34,335 churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC's 11,498,613 members, making up the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, are the fabric of the now somewhat frayed Bible Belt that arcs from California to Virginia. In folklore--and partly in fact--they stand as stern exponents of a Scripture understood in literal terms and a life lived by rough-hewn moral precepts. Last week the 13,500 "messengers" who gathered in Denver for the SBC's 125th anniversary meeting* seemed to be running true to type. They filled the air with gospel singing and crowded onstage to deliver fervent "testimonies" before a background painted in Sunday-school pastels.

But in the words of outgoing SBC President W.A. Criswell, "termites" are gnawing at the group's fundamentalist foundations. Recent years have seen a growing movement away from the old Bible-thumping toward a more liberal faith--particularly among some of the SBC's seminary teachers and publications editors. The liberals have taken a progressive line not only on such issues as race and ecumenism, but above all on biblical interpretation, finally joining scholars of other denominations in doubting that the text was inspired word-for-word by God and is thereby infallible. Last year Criswell, pastor of the 15,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, inadvertently brought these trends to a head by publishing a book titled Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True. The book enraged the Association of Baptist Professors of Religion, and in the ensuing furor Southern Baptists divided over whether to embrace or reject Criswell's credo.

Playboy Debate. Any good Baptist regards the Bible as the ultimate authority, to be interpreted by each individual according to his own lights. Although the conservatives are by far the more numerous and vocal camp in the SBC, they can invoke no doctrinal discipline to block the liberals' inroads. Last week's meeting, instead of bringing the messengers together, only made their differences more glaring.

In one session, the conservatives yielded ten minutes of platform time to a dozen black collegians from Denver, one of whom shouted that the SBC's ranks include members who have "castrated, murdered and raped black people." "No!" and "Lie!" countered the audience. Later, the budget for the SBC's social-action agency, the Christian life commission, went through with a 15% increase, despite conservative complaints about past ventures by the commission (including an invitation to a Playboy spokesman last March to participate in a forum on the new morality). As the week wore on, however, grass-roots resentment built up steadily; finally it exploded when the meeting took up Volume I of a projected twelve-volume Bible commentary published by the SBC's Sunday-school board in Nashville.

Too Much Room. The book includes a commentary on Genesis written by English Baptist G. Henton Davies, a middle-of-the-road Old Testament scholar. It is a compendium of outrages to the fundamentalists. For example, he is sympathetic to the "documentary hypothesis" on the origins of Genesis. The theory holds that Moses was not the author but rather that the book is composed of several "parallel narratives." "This tears the heart from the word of God," charged the Rev. Glennon Cul-well of Santa Cruz, Calif., during angry debate. By a vote of 5,394 to 2,170, the conservatives carried an unprecedented motion demanding that the book be withdrawn as "out of harmony with the beliefs of the vast majority of Southern Baptist pastors and people."

New SBC President Carl E. Bates, a moderate from Charlotte, N.C., strove to maintain a conciliatory tone. "We're not trying to get everybody under one credal statement here," he said. But with one wing straining toward a more progressive stance and the other digging in stubbornly on fundamentals, the SBC's real problem seemed to be holding everybody under one denominational roof. As Pastor Robert Scott of Williamstown, Mo., put it: "It's been said that we've got room for the most conservative and the most liberal in the Southern Baptist Convention. But brother, I say that's too much room."

* The breakaway group was founded in 1845 in reaction to a decision by the U.S. Baptists' mission board that it would offend the Gospel to appoint slaveowners as foreign missionaries.

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