The twentieth century witnessed a great struggle in Southern Baptist life: the struggle over the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Do the Scriptures contain the Word of God, or are the Scriptures the Word of God? Do the Scriptures contain truth, or are the Scriptures truth?

Baptist heritage is clear: the Scriptures are the Word of God, and the Scriptures are truth. It doesn’t mean that every statement in the Bible is truth. When the Bible quotes the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1), the fool’s statement is not true because God does exist. What is true is that “the fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” 

Southern Baptist heritage arose out of the foundational understanding that the Bible is inerrant. What the Bible teaches is true, whether the biblical focus is creation or geography or history or spiritual. Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, however, and culminating with our seminaries’ denying inerrancy in the 1960s and 1970s, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention had shifted from a Bible-centered and God-centered denomination to a man-centered pragmatic enterprise. Sure, belief in Jesus was affirmed, but the question increasingly became, “Which Jesus?”: the Jesus of the Scriptures or the Jesus reimagined in the minds of liberal Christianity, the Jesus of righteousness and holiness or the Jesus that reflected the culture, a “Jesus” who would bless things that the Bible pronounces to be wicked and sinful?

During the 1970s a group of Southern Baptist inerrantists believed that something had to be done. Most denominational leaders of the SBC, especially those leading and teaching in our seminaries, did not reflect what most members of Southern Baptist churches believed. The process was long and arduous, but the inerrantists won. Securing the presidency of the SBC through elections at the annual conventions, the new presidents were able through established processes to replace non-inerrantist trustees on denominational boards with inerrantists. In the seminaries, non-inerrantist presidents were replaced with inerrantist presidents, and those presidents gathered faculties of inerrantist biblical scholars who would teach that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God. And so the battle was won . . . or was it?

What has become evident over the ensuing decades is that inerrancy is not enough. Churches are still led by pragmatic methods and not by biblical principles. “Does is work?” continues to replace “What does the Bible teach?” in our churches. A full-fledged gospel of the kingdom of God is reduced to a few statements to induce a person to “ask Jesus into your heart.”

What is the problem? The problem is not inerrancy. Inerrancy is foundational to understanding and believing in and living out what the Bible teaches. If the Bible is not thoroughly true, it is reduced to a well-intentioned book of religion written by men that can be followed or ignored without consequence.

The problem is that while the SBC won the battle for inerrancy, it continued to lose the battle for a thorough-going biblical theology. Baptists believe a hodgepodge of things. We no longer see the Bible as one book centered upon Jesus Christ. While we regained the inerrancy of our Baptists forbears, we failed to regain their covenant theology which gave them that Christ-centered understanding of all of Scripture.

Historically, this is seen in our Baptist confessions of faith, our doctrinal statements. Our earlier confessions, the London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689) along with its restatements in America as the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742) and the Charleston Confession of Faith (1767), were vigorous and doctrinally specific statements of what Particular (Reformed) Baptists believed and what the founding churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (1845) believed. The twentieth century, however, saw a “big tent” confession of faith approach in its editions of the Baptist Faith and Message (1925, 1963, 2000), reflecting the movement in the SBC towards Arminianism [salvation is by man’s choice] and dispensationalism.

A church will never rise any higher in its understanding of God and his will than the depth of its theology. Deep theology does not mean theology that is hard to understand. It means theology that is biblically faithful and biblically specific, not a general summary that allows as many divergent views as possible. Does a church see itself as Reformed or as semi-Arminian and/or dispensational?