It’s common these days for Christians to talk about their upbringing in ways that point out all the flaws and missteps of whatever tradition formed them. “My church failed at this . . .” or “My pastor failed at that . . .” Too many times, this way of looking back at the churches that nurtured us seems overly critical—always quick to notice the blind spots, stains, and failures, while strangely overlooking the good, the true, and the beautiful in our inheritance.
I preface this article this way because I’m about to point out something that I missed while growing up in a church with an evangelical ethos, but I don’t want to join the ranks of those who are ever railing against their upbringing. My gratitude far outstrips any complaint I have about the churches I belonged to as a child and then as a teenager.
But there is one thing I missed, and it’s something vital I hope that our generation will reclaim: a greater awareness of church history.
Church with No Memory
For 14 years, I attended a school affiliated with an independent Baptist church. For more than a decade, during the most formative years of adolescence, I was a member of a Southern Baptist church plant that quickly grew and was known for expository preaching on Sundays, community outreach during the week, and mission work in other parts of the world every year. In these environments, I was catechized in the major doctrines of the Christian faith. I studied the Bible and memorized verses. I received sound teaching.
But there was little truth delivered in either setting that felt rooted in something other than its own experience. It’s as if we were one sturdy branch of a tree we never talked about. From the truncated version of history offered in school and church, you’d think that the history of the church skipped from the days of the New Testament to the time of the Reformation (but we didn’t hear much about Reformation history either). We Baptists weren’t completely ahistorical; we listed our heroes and we liked our hymns, but it didn’t seem like our version of Christianity had much to say before the 1800s.
Thankfully, this absence of historical awareness didn’t lead to a “no creed but the Bible” mindset that permitted doctrinal aberration. We weren’t atheological. We had our confessions of faith. We had our catechisms. We were robustly trinitarian, yet without much discussion of the ancient debates that delivered to us these essential Christian truths.
In all, we had our convictions and we had our church; we just never talked about how our church’s convictions connected with the wider Christian tradition. Years later, when I joined the pastoral team of a Baptist church, I was surprised by the number of people who—in personal conversation and in requesting topics for Wednesday night classes—asked, “Please tell me the difference between what we believe and what other churches believe.” Within this question lurked several others:
- Who are we?
- Where did we come from?
- Why are there so many types of churches?
- How do we relate to these other churches?
- How do all the churches relate to the Bible?
Baptists and the Christian Tradition
I’m not the only Baptist who believes we should have more historical memory and contemporary awareness of the wider Christian tradition. A new book of essays, Baptists and the Christian Tradition: Towards an Evangelical Baptist Catholicity, has recently been released, edited by Matthew Emerson, Christopher Morgan, and Lucas Stamps, and published by B&H Academic.
This book, the fruit of a recently formed “Center for Baptist Renewal,” links Baptists to the wider Christian tradition. As theologian Timothy George points out in the foreword, three convictions are evident in these essays: history counts, theology matters, and we should retrieve treasures from the past in order to renew the church in the present.
The book begins with an explanation of unity. Unity is one of the foundational beliefs of the church: we believe the church is one, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic. Early Baptist confessions were explicit about church unity. In the past century, The Baptist Faith and Message has shifted to language about “cooperation,” but rightly understood, “our unity as the church grounds our common mission and obliges our cooperation” (25).
Baptists who love to think of themselves as “people of the book” may wonder why any engagement with past Christian tradition is necessary. But in one of the most insightful essays in this book, Rhyne Putman explains the historic understanding of Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) over against rival interpretations that would dismiss any place for Christian tradition in a Baptist’s self-understanding. Early Baptists had no problem affirming both biblical authority and creeds, or using creeds and confessions in order to ensure pastoral or organizational accountability.
Other chapters examine how Baptist theologians relied on older theological writings, Baptist or not, in order to join with the wider Christian tradition in affirming the Trinity, for example, and the intricacies of a proper Christology. The danger in dismissing ancient Christian tradition is in leaving Baptists “without the categories provided by the history of interpretation and the history of doctrine,” and thus “open to idiosyncratic ways of synthesizing the biblical teaching” (105).
Other essays lay out an awareness of Baptist distinctiveness when it comes to questions of church membership, the practice of baptism, and the significance of the Lord’s Supper.
By the end of the book, the perspective has shifted to questions of Baptist identity. David Dockery situates Baptists within the context of evangelicalism and the Christian tradition, following up on the good work he has done over the course of decades (see especially, Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals from 1993, Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal from 2009, and Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Future of Denominationalism from 2011). Soojin Chung looks at Baptists within the context of the global Christian movement, and Walter Strickland lays out particular challenges related to Baptist unity across multiple denominations, which due to past injustice and oppression have remained largely white or black.
Why This Conversation Matters
Why should Baptists be aware of church history and the development of Christian teaching over the centuries beyond those of Baptist teachings? The short answer is that we are formed by these traditions whether we realize it or not. The proper response is gratitude, not ignorance. Understanding this source of formation helps us know where to turn when we face challenges that feel unprecedented: we can retrieve treasures from the past to help us navigate the future.
A greater awareness of the wider Christian tradition has another effect, also important: we come to see differences among denominations that are not first-tier issues; we come to understand areas where a deeper unity can remain, even when there is disagreement on non-essential doctrines. (Here is my review of two recent books that examine the concept of “theological triage,” and why it matters today.)
But there’s one more important answer that comes to mind. A greater awareness of our relationship to the wider Christian tradition helps keep us grounded in times when doctrinal aberrations or cultural pressures or reappearing heresies might lead us astray. We are more likely to remain confident in our convictions when cultural winds threaten to sway us toward moral positions or doctrinal beliefs that would be more palatable to contemporary tastes.
I’m grateful for a rising generation of Baptist leaders who believe it is important to connect our heritage to the wider Christian inheritance. One of the essays in this book includes a quote from L. Russ Bush:
“We are living and making the history of the future. What we teach and do today will be what future Christians consider to be their heritage” (348).
I hope that what we do and teach today will be influenced by a greater awareness of all of Christian history, so that Christians in the centuries that follow, Baptists or not, will find us to have been a faithful generation filled with resources that will aid them in the challenges they face.
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