Bible Brouhaha

A Baptist power struggle

Being president of the Southern Baptist Convention is a largely honorary job, and most presidents typically tend their 13.6 million-member flock in obscurity. Not the Rev. Bailey Smith of Del City, Okla. Last August, Smith offhandedly told a conservative political rally, "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." In the furor that predictably followed, Smith met with Jewish leaders and said he regretted hurting anyone's feelings, but never took back the remark.

At the annual meeting of Southern Baptists last week in Los Angeles, Smith was up for a second one-year term. Though re-election is supposed to be automatic, he faced an unprecedented campaign to remove him from office.

Over the Jewish prayer question? Not at all. The issue was the Bible and how it shall be taught. A Southern Baptist president has one notable power: indirect control over nominations to boards that run the six Southern Baptist seminaries. Smith, like his predecessor, is a scriptural hard-liner who believes the Bible is "in-errant," free of errors in all matters spiritual and historical. Inerrantists believe, for example, that a whale actually swallowed Jonah and that Adam and Eve were individuals, not symbols. That is the faith of most grass-roots Southern Baptists but not necessarily of the seminary professors, many of whom interpret the Bible somewhat less rigidly. For three years hard-liners have been plotting to dominate the denomination.

In Southern Baptist terms, Smith, 42, is a formidable figure, a fiery redhaired, old-style prairie stem-winder. Last year his First Southern Baptist Church in Del City listed 2,027 baptisms by immersion, a record for the S.B.C. and, presumably, any other U.S. Protestant group. In opposition to Smith's candidacy, anti-Smith moderates fielded distinguished, disarming Abner McCall, 66, former president of Baylor University. McCall was described by his backers as "a Lincoln who can preserve this Baptist union."

But the heated talk in Los Angeles was more theological than personal. The seminaries, gibed the Rev. Paige Patterson, Dallas Bible college president and leading hardliner, offer "a Dalmatian theology"--one holding that "the Bible is inspired only in spots." Once professors accept "human embellishments" in the Bible, Patterson contended, there is no logical place to stop, and Christians find themselves "cast on a hopeless sea of subjectivism." But Houston Pastor Kenneth Chafin, a moderate, called the inerrancy crusade nothing more "than a naked, ruthless reach for personal power."

In an atmosphere reminiscent of a political convention, 13,000 "messengers" to Los Angeles cast computer ballots and gave Smith a 61% majority. But McCall seemed satisfied. His 39%, he said, would be sufficient warning to Smith and his friends not to pack the seminary boards with hardliners. qed

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