The First Baptist Church of Granada Hills

            February has a way of reminding us of love; it’s host to Valentine’s Day after all.  No doubt, those of us in relationships will happily exchange little reminders of our love with that “someone special” this month.  Some will give chocolates, others will give cards, and still others will give depressingly over-priced flowers. 

            For Christians, though, the idea of love is something that transcends mere candy-grams and rose bouquets.  For, as the Apostle John would twice write in his first letter, “God is love.”  Now that’s a beautiful sentiment, and it isn’t particularly controversial.  In fact, it’s among the better liked and more widely embraced beliefs about God, even among non-Christians.  But this little unassuming statement very naturally leads us from a simple and uncontroversial truth to something else entirely.  For if God is love—not, that is, that God simply does love, or that God merely approves of love—then this simple statement is just another way of presenting one of the great mysteries of God: the Trinity. 

            To say that God is love is to say that, in some sense, God is a relationship, that interconnectedness exists at his very core.  The doctrine of the Trinity (or at least it’s most controversial element—the co-equality of the Father and the Son), while not as snappy or as widely received as John’s little maxim, stands out, then, as little more than the intellectual analysis of his slogan.  As another man once wrote, “The barren dogma is only the logical way of stating the beautiful sentiment.”  So while the affirmations of the Nicene Creed may not make for romantic Valentine’s Day reading, they are worth considering at this time of year.  Think about it.

            One sometimes hears the complaint that if God really wanted people to worship Him in a specific way He would have made His desires more obviously known than He apparently has.  The idea here is that the death and resurrection of a relatively insignificant Jew living in some backwater of the Roman Empire in the 1^st century seems like a silly way for God to initiate some worldwide plan of conversion.  Certainly God could have done better than that, says the skeptic.

            But to quote Jesus: “wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” (Luke 7:35)  However bizarre and counter-intuitive the incarnation and atonement seem to us, strangely, bafflingly even, it seems that God knew what He was doing in Christ.  As the British physicist and priest, John Polkinghorne, has said, “Perhaps the most surprising thing about Jesus Christ is that we have all heard of Him. Of course He had an impressive public ministry, saying wise things and doing compassionate deeds. But then it all seemed to collapse and fall apart. He was arrested, deserted by His disillusioned followers, painfully and shamefully executed, suffering a death that any pious 1st-century Jew would have seen as a sign of God’s rejection… Yet we have all heard of Jesus, and He has been a powerfully influential figure for 2,000 years.”   

            From an obscure cult centering on an executed criminal in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. to the single most numerous and ethnically diverse faith in all of human history with a substantial presence on all seven continents today (including Antarctica!)—it would seem that Christianity has done a very good job of “getting the word out.”  To apply Jesus’ words, the wisdom of God’s choice to work in and through Jesus and His followers has been vindicated by Christianity’s unimaginable subsequent cross-cultural evangelistic success.

The Christian faith is a complex thing with all sorts of remarkable components: theological doctrines like the Trinity and justification by faith, predictive claims like the resurrection of the dead, and ethical imperatives like turning the proverbial cheek are all part and parcel of the larger whole.  But even with all this complexity, and regardless of the direction from which one approaches it, eventually the person inquiring into Christianity will have to deal with Jesus.  Jesus stands at the center of the faith; indeed one could reasonably say that Christianity is Christ, that it is Jesus. 

Now from an evangelistic standpoint this is great.  People love Jesus; even people who hate Christianity often love Jesus!  His character, his ethic, his style—all these things are just so attractive.  I think it’s safe to say that Jesus is generally the first thing the non-Christian seeker finds appealing about the faith and the last thing that the Christian doubter finds repellant.  Even if one feels that the somewhat esoteric or supernatural elements of the faith are just so much pious superstition, that same person generally regards Jesus as a decidedly good and noble human being, as a teacher of wise and moral things. 

But there’s a trap here for such sympathetic unbelievers: the ethics of Jesus—along with his style and character and all that—seem to have utterly failed him in his own life on a non-Christian reading.  As the skeptical New Testament scholar, Dale C. Allison writes in Resurrecting Jesus:

“[T]here are reasons I should very much like to believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus and reckon it more than a symbol, more than just a way of saying that his cause continues or that he lives on in the memory of the church.

“My first reason is the conviction that the teaching of Jesus, which as a Christian I am committed to, may well hang in the air without a dramatic, postmortem endorsement… Unlike the wisdom sayings of Proverbs, Jesus’ sometimes otherworldly, sometimes ascetical, often eschatological, often counterintuitive teachings—‘Love your enemies,’ do not be ‘angry,’ do not divorce and remarry—are not self-validating.  On the contrary, they are at every turn debatable.  They further self-destruct if the humble, including Jesus himself, are never exalted.  So the crucifixion and Jesus’ cry of dereliction require a sequel.  If they do not receive one, most of Jesus’ speech loses much of its plausibility, and he becomes just another futile dreamer, a messianic pretender whose words may be dismissed as fantasy.  But if the resurrection is the sequel, then God has ‘transformed the fate of the lost Jesus by openly and finally acting out in the person of Jesus the image of God that Jesus espoused.’”

If the story of Jesus is really to be denuded of its supernatural elements (resurrection and all) then Jesus’ beautiful ethic of love and compassion is shown up as worse than useless before the harsh realities of the world as it actually is.  If Jesus’ story really does end on Good Friday, then our hope for a kindlier truth dies with him and Rome triumphs; once again Caesar prevails and the brutal logic of pragmatic violence prevails through him…  But if Christ really rose from the grave (as his disciples vigorously declared in the face of threats, beatings, and death itself) then that hope can live on.  And if Christ really did rise, then, it would seem, a great many more of Christianity’s historic claims are back on the table. 

Think about it.

            Two men, Theist and Atheist, find themselves walking together along a woodland road.  As it’s a crisp and beautiful day and neither is in any rush the two begin a conversation.  Amid their talk of wives and children, occupations and recreation they both come to notice the beauty and harmony of the world around them: a sparrow picks at seeds on the ground, a gentle wind blows through the tall grass along the way, and the sunlight filtering through the trees overhead casts a variegated amber and green glow over the scene.

            “What a wonderful world we live in,” says Theist.

            “Wonderful indeed,” replies Atheist. “The grandeur of nature never ceases to amaze me.”

            “Quite right,” says Theist, “But we mustn’t forget to allow the grandeur of the world to turn our minds to the greatness of its Maker.”

            “I don’t follow you there,” says Atheist.  “To me the glory of the world is enough in itself; I see no reason to postulate a Maker—the world simply is.”

            Theist squints for a second and then responds, “How then do you explain all this: the beauty, the harmony, the integration, and how especially do you account for that?”  And with this Theist motioned to a one meter tall cube standing before them both in the middle of the road.  The block seemed heavy and solid and upon it was engraved the following: “DESIGN”.

            “Ah, yes,” said Atheist, “That is striking.  The complexity of the trees, the grass, even that little sparrow; I can clearly understand why these living things convey the impression of design.  But we must remember that these things are merely the end product of a process of development: little random genetic changes being filtered through a screen of natural selection in which what works survives.”  And with this Atheist put his shoulder to the block and began to push while Theist looked on.  Atheist’s heels dug into the ground and little beads of sweat emerged on his brow but after some effort he was able to push the block a good fifty feet away from where he and his companion had been chatting.  Once this labor was done he returned to Theist and smiled contentedly.

            “True enough,” said Theist, “But evolution can only take place because biochemistry is what it is.  Without the fundamental units of life being what they are with their ability to bond and divide as they do at the molecular level and so on we wouldn’t have evolved to enjoy the world around us.  Chemistry itself seems surprisingly specified; again, it seems designed.”

            “Quite right,” admitted Atheist, “But even those chemical mechanisms which underlie life are themselves the result of a process of development.  At the beginning of time it was all pretty much very simple and largely boring elements like hydrogen and helium and only through the slow march of time and the workings of gravity and so on did stars form which converted these basic elements into more interesting stuff like carbon.  These stars sometimes exploded and then reformed into new stars with planets and these planets (seeded, as it were, with these heavier and more complicated molecules) ultimately produced the first forms of life which then went on to evolve.  So, again, the design that seems implicit in chemistry (which stands behind the design that seems to underlie biology) is illusory—the end product of a natural process.”

            Once more, after concluding his remarks, Atheist walked up to the block and began to push it further down the road.  Theist could hear Atheist grunting and once or twice he thought he heard Atheist cursing the block in frustration for its being as heavy as it was.  This time when Atheist returned to Theist the block stood a hundred feet away and Atheist was panting slightly from his exertion.

            “What you say is all true,” said Theist. “But just as the development of biology is only possible because of the complex and very particular chemistry of our universe, so too the development of that chemistry is only possible because of the complex and very particular physics which order existence; just as biology is simply the flowering of idiosyncratic chemistry so chemistry is just the flowering of idiosyncratic physics.  Were the strengths of the fundamental forces or the sizes and masses of fundamental particles even very slight different than what they are complex chemistry wouldn’t exist and thus biology wouldn’t exist.  The reality of design persists.”

            At this Atheist became a bit irritated.  “Fine, but have you ever considered that maybe, just maybe, our universe isn’t the only one that there is?  Perhaps there are countless universes out there—somewhere beyond the threshold of our observation—all being brought into existence by spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum (or something).  The fundamental forces present in each of these universes might have different values and the same might be true for their fundamental particles as well!  And given this diversity it’s only natural to imagine that at least some of the universes in this larger, potentially infinite collection would have physical laws such that complex chemistry would emerge at some point which would in turn give rise to biology and thus, in the course of time, to rational observers!”

            Then, somewhat brusquely, Atheist marched off in the direction of the block.  Theist tried to call after him that such thinking was entirely speculative—metaphysical even—and lacked any observational confirmation but Atheist didn’t seem to hear him—he was muttering indignantly to himself pretty loudly as he walked away.   Again Atheist began pushing the block and after quite a bit of huffing and puffing he came back to Theist, this time from a distance of one hundred and fifty feet.

            “There!  Done and done,” said Atheist to Theist, now pretty well exhausted and even a little grimy from all his effort.  “Like I said, (deep breath)… the design (deep breath)… is merely (deep breath)… apparent; it’s not real.”

            “But that simply doesn’t follow,” retorted Theist.  “Even if our universe is just one piece of a larger ‘multiverse’ that doesn’t really change anything.  Just as our universe operates according to certain regular laws it would seem that a quantum vacuum (or whatever) that makes large numbers of universes would operate according to certain regular laws too.  And if such an entity does exist why then, of all the possible laws it could be operating with, does it seem to be operating with precisely those laws that lead to the eventual emergence of a universe with our physics, which inevitably produce complex chemistry, which inevitably ends up producing life, which inevitably ends up producing rational observers?  It all hangs on a presumably very specific, finely tuned ‘law of laws’ which would allow for all the rest.  I mean, look,” and with this Theist pointed down the road to where the block rested—now a rather small dot in their field of vision for all the distance, “It’s still there.  You’ve only succeeded in distancing it from us.”

            With a clear tone of exasperation and a roll of his eyes Atheist took another long breath and said, “Well, you have to at least admit that it’s a lot smaller now.  When we first started talking the block was a meter cubed; now it’s so small I can blot it out with just my thumb.”

            Theist looked at his companion rather quizzically, then he looked at the block, then back to Atheist again, “Umm… I don’t know… something about that statement doesn’t seem quite right.”

 The Biblical Situation

            When one seeks to develop an idea of the biblical structure of the Church one encounters a problem.  Clearly the Bible speaks of “servants” (generally just transliterated into English as “deacons”, 1 Tim. 3:8) and “elders” (generally called pastors, priests, or preachers, 1 Tim. 4:14).  The Bible also speaks of “overseers” (1 Tim. 3:1), which were probably the same thing as elders. But we’re told that not all elders were involved in the teaching or preaching of scripture (1 Tim. 5:17). Additionally, it’s clear that the Apostles exercised control over multiple congregations and sometimes delegated this regional authority to proxies (Titus 1:5).  What’s more, when Paul spoke of the various kinds of people in leadership in the church he included all sorts of “offices” in his lists (1 Cor. 12:28, Eph. 4:11).

            Given all this, it appears that, as a recent Baptist theologian, Millard Erickson, has conceded, “There is no prescriptive exposition of what the government of the church is to be [in the Bible].”  Further, even when we look for a description of the way it was (as opposed to the way it should be), Erickson admits, “the evidence from the New Testament is inconclusive,” and, “There may well have been rather wide varieties of governmental arrangements.”

Uniformity and Diversity

            Be this as it may, the post-New Testament Church quickly came to adopt a three-tiered model of government as the official standard with deacons below priests who were in turn below bishops.  As time went on this model was further embellished with subsets of each layer of the hierarchy: sub-deacons, archdeacons, archpriests, archbishops, and so on.  When the Protestant Reformation rolled through Europe, though, this structure was challenged and abandoned in many places.  As each group sought to be faithful to the larger Protestant rallying-cry of “scripture alone”, the various sects were forced to once again face the ambiguity of the New Testament text and, not surprisingly, produced various ecclesiologies.  Anglicans and some Lutherans kept the classic episcopal three-tiered structure, Presbyterians and other Lutherans embraced synodical governance predicated on a two-tiered structure with serious congregational interconnectedness, and Baptists and Congregationalist opted for a two-tiered structure without much in the way of interconnectedness.

The Baptist Mainstream

            As it stands today, most Baptists continue the tradition of only recognizing two levels within the clergy: deacons and elders.  Generally speaking these are the only two offices for which one must be ordained. Other positions within the church (secretary, treasurer, usher, etc.) are not normally counted as clerical in the sense of being a part of the clergy.  It should be noted, though, that even among mainstream Baptists this two-tiered structure is not as simple as it first appears.  Just as in the medieval period these two tiers have been further subdivided by many congregations by postulating chairmen of deacon bodies and senior pastors which exercise authority over other pastors.

Exceptions and Corollaries

            Despite the broad consensus of the Baptist mainstream, there are a handful of Baptist groups that do not embrace a two-tiered model or modify it in significant ways. On the one hand there are episcopal Baptists groups such as the Evangelical Baptist Union of Georgia, the Union of Baptist Churches in Latvia, and the Episcopal Baptist Church in Congo which all embrace a three-tiered view of the clergy with bishops at the top.  On the other hand, a growing number of Baptist churches in the U.S. (including many Southern Baptists) are moving toward an “elder led” model of church governance in which the “two-offices” of the Baptist mainstream are retained but the office of elder is divided into “teaching elders” and “lay elders” resulting in something of a de facto three-tiered model of church government

The doctrine of individual soul liberty (sometimes called “soul competency”) is the belief that each individual is ultimately and personally responsible to God.  Given this, it would be inappropriate for human persons or institutions to set themselves up as spiritual authorities who must be obeyed on pain of penalty; such a position would be, at least implicitly, a usurpation of God’s own role.

            In a sense this doctrine is very much related to the belief in the priesthood of all believers.  In both cases a distinct anti-authoritarian disposition is very much in view.  Likewise, both dogmas stress the importance of personal involvement in one’s spirituality.  Thus, at times, these two related concepts are used almost interchangeably but helpful distinctions can still be made: Whereas the priesthood of all believers asserts the responsibility of every Christian to participate personally in God’s redemptive mission, the notion of individual soul liberty asserts the responsibility of all Christians to relate personally to God with faith and love.  One might say that while the priesthood of all believers is a centrifugal doctrine, pushing believers out into the world on mission, individual soul liberty is a centripetal doctrine, pulling believers in towards God in worship.

            While almost universally recognized in the modern world, this doctrine was quite revolutionary in its infancy and was distinctly Baptist.  During the Reformation many groups sought to impose doctrinal uniformity through force.  Executions by burning, drowning, hanging, beheading and tortures of all sorts intended to bring about obedience to a dogmatic standard were common in the Christian world.  It was against this backdrop that Baptists articulated the doctrine of individual soul liberty and its ideological cousin “voluntarism”.

            Since during the 16^th and 17^th centuries most church bodies were officially connected in some way to civil authority, the doctrine of individual soul liberty led very naturally to a belief that government should not meddle in religious matters.  As the Baptist patriarch Thomas Helwys famously opined, “[O]ur lord the king is but an earthly king, and he has no authority as a king but in earthly causes. And if the king’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all human laws made by the king, our lord the king can require no more. For men’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king shall not answer for it. Neither may the king be judge between God and man. Let them be heretics, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it appertains not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”

            It must be noted though that in recent years this radical separation of Church and State has proven increasingly problematic.  As the Western world enters a “post-Christian” phase many moral principles, once considered universal, have been seen to be religiously grounded.  As such, to retain a sense of explicitly moral governance, many Baptists (particularly conservatives) have distanced themselves from the absolutist perspectives of their forefather in favor of a more moderate alternative.

 When Christ established His Church He provided it with both His teachings and a number of sacred rituals for its guidance.  These rituals, sometimes called “sacraments” (from the Latin for “to consecrate”), sometimes called “ordinances” (from the Latin for “to put in order”), move the Christian faith out of the purely intellectual realm and into the embodied physicality of real life since they involve some material element.  As such, just as Jesus was the incarnation of God, one could argue that the sacraments/ordinances are the “incarnation” of Jesus’ teaching.

            In the medieval period the Western Church defined seven distinct acts as sacraments: baptism, confirmation, the Lord’s Supper, penance, marriage, “Holy Orders” (the act of entering the clergy or para-clergy), and “Last Rites”. However, during the Reformation, many theologians questioned the sacramental status of some of these acts.  While all (or at least most) of these practices could be supported biblically, some of them lacked a material component (i.e. penance and Holy Orders) and others were not specifically instituted by Jesus Himself (confirmation, marriage, and possibly Last Rites).  As a result the Protestant reformers generally recognized only two rituals of the Church as sacraments/ordinances proper: baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

            As a second generation Protestant group, the Baptists inherited this more limited view of the sacraments.  But at the same time Baptists have historically understood the two ordinances somewhat differently than most other Protestants.  Specifically Baptists have embraced a view of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper that is decidedly more rationalistic and less mystical than most of their fellow Protestants.

Baptism

            Baptists, like all Christians, view baptism as the definitive rite of initiation into the Christian Church.  Like all historical Christians, Baptists believe baptism involves contact with water and the pronouncement of the Trinitarian formula recorded in Matthew 28:19.  Additionally, Baptists have made a very serious point of imitating the New Testament practice of Baptism as closely as possible.  This entails reserving baptism for only those with conscious faith in Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  As such, Baptists do not baptize babies.  Additionally, for most of their history, Baptists have baptized only by immersion, or, more specifically, by submersion—placing the entire body of the one being baptized under water.  Again this is seen as an attempt to follow New Testament practice as closely as possible (Romans 6:4). 

            While there is uniform agreement on the regular method of baptism (believers, by submersion), a diversity of views exist regarding the question of whether rites called baptism which do not meet this standard may be considered valid—albeit irregular—baptisms.  For instance, is the baptism of a five year-old child by submersion valid?  Is the baptism of a believer by infusion (pouring) valid?  On these issues Baptists disagree.

The Lord’s Supper

            Baptists, like all Christians, view the Lord’s Supper as a repeated rite of Christian discipleship.  Like all historical Christians, Baptists believe the Lord’s Supper involves the consumption of bread and the juice of grapes. 

            Interestingly though, while Baptists have been firmly committed to practicing baptism in strict accordance with the New Testament model, the same cannot be said regarding the Lord’s Supper.  Whereas it appears that the Lord’s Supper was a part of normal weekly worship of the first Christians, many Baptist churches partake of the rite monthly and some churches do so only quarterly.  Also, while the New Testament makes it clear that the Lord’s Supper was instituted using actual alcoholic wine (1 Cor. 11:21), beginning in the 19^th century many Baptists in the United States began substituting non-alcoholic juice for the wine and most Baptist churches in North America have followed this tradition ever since.

            As for the significance of the meal, most Baptists embrace what can be called a Memorialist or Zwinglian (after the Swiss reformer, Huldrick Zwingli) view: the meal is symbolic of Christ’s body and draws our attention to His death and coming return.  It may be said that, in the Lord’s Supper, a real change takes place, but it takes place in the mind of the worshipper and not in the physical elements of the rite.

            During the medieval period, a serious division was introduced into Christ’s Church.  This division was not so much between one region and another region or one theological position and another theological position.  Instead this particular division cut through each and every congregation separating the people behind the altar from those in front of it.  Put another way, this was a division between the clergy (ordained religious specialists) and the laity (non-ordained Christians in general).  It was believed that clergymen, at the moment of their ordination by a bishop in a valid line of apostolic succession, were changed in some miraculous way so as to enable them to transform the elements of the Lord’s Supper into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ.     This belief, in turn, slowly gave rise to what is now called “clericalism”, the elevation of the clergy as a class to greater and greater levels of power and prestige.  Eventually, Christians began to think of clergymen (along with some non-ordained monks and nuns) as “the real Church” with ordinary Christians functioning largely as spectators during religious services.  Thus, when one spoke of “the Church” doing something, what was generally meant was that the clergy (priests and bishops and some monastic groups) were doing something.  It was the clergy who were to represent Jesus, study His words, oversee His people, and evangelize the world; the laity were pretty much just along for the ride. 

            During the Protestant Reformation a number of reformers vigorously opposed this now entrenched situation.  These men sought to return to an earlier and more biblical view of the Church as all of God’s people—both ordained and not—working towards God-pleasing goals and prosecuting the Church’s mission.  This belief came to be known as the doctrine of the “priesthood of believers” and finds its clearest biblical support in such passages as 1 Peter 2:4-5 & 9, Revelation 1:5b-6 and Revelation 5:9-10.

            While the priesthood of all believers is a doctrine embraced by all Protestants (and even more recently by the Roman Catholic Church in a limited form, Lumen Gentium II.10) Baptists have emphasized the belief far beyond most other groups.  As such it is generally considered a hallmark of Baptist theology and has been implemented in a variety of ways—some good and some less so.  Two alternative approaches appear below.

The Priesthood of the Believer

            Baptist ideology has had a significant role in the development of American political philosophy.  At the same time, American political philosophy has had a significant role in the development of Baptist ideology.  As a result some Baptists have uncritically embraced the radical individualism of American culture and read that back into their view of the Bible.  When this happens a radically individualistic spirituality is often the result in which each believer feels himself an island and thinks that his theological views are equally as valid as any other’s.  This is sometimes called the priesthood of the believer, as if the individual has some office which he exercises as an individual.  Such a stance generally leads to a great deal of theological diversity within communities since, if no one person’s interpretation is more authoritative than any other’s (the whole concept of theological authority being relativized), all competing interpretations are merely “perspectives” to be graciously tolerated.

The Priesthood of All Believers

            It is important to note that in the passages of the Bible where the priesthood of believers is mentioned it is always applied to the Church as a group and not to individuals.  What’s more, 1 Peter 2:4-5 & 9, while foundational to the concept as a whole, is not a New Testament novelty; it is simply a quotation from the Old Testament, specifically Exodus 19:5-6.  Thus, what Israel was the Church now is.  But if ancient Israel, God’s priestly people, nevertheless contained genuine religious authorities (specifically, the Levitical priesthood) we should not expect the Church, God’s priestly people, to lack them.  Indeed the New Testament clearly indicates that the local church should have religious specialist who function as religious authorities (1 Timothy 3, Hebrews 13:17). Rather, all Christians are part of a universal abstract priesthood in the sense that they are, just as Israel was, intended to be a light to the nations, functioning collectively as a witness to the truth of God in the midst of spiritual and moral confusion.  In this broader sense the Church is a priest and each of its members has some part to play in that identity.

The Old Order

            From about the year AD 150 to 1500 the Church was uniformly organized along geographic lines.  Generally speaking a number of local congregations were clustered together into what is called a diocese under the authority of a bishop.  Additionally, individual dioceses were often further grouped around archdioceses under the authority of archbishops.  And at times these archdioceses were likewise under the authority of a patriarchate.

            The question of whether this policy (or some simplified version of it) was practiced in the New Testament period (AD 30 to 90) is a difficult one.  On the one hand, some sort of regional authority does seem to have been exercised by the Apostles (e.g. James in Jerusalem) and this role was even exercised by men who were not Apostles themselves (e.g. Titus 1:5).  In the Book of Revelation (written circa AD 90), Jesus commends the church at Smyrna (2:8-11) for its rich spirituality; Ignatius of Antioch (died AD 117) would also write to this region and addressed his letter to the bishop, Polycarp. 

            On the other hand, there is evidence that especially large cities with multiple Christian communities did not always have a single bishop running the show: there is some confusion as to who succeeded Peter as the leader of the Christians in Rome and this may be explained by the presence of numerous cooperating but not consolidated church bodies in the city.  Also, when Ignatius wrote a letter to the Roman Christians, he interestingly didn’t mention a bishop.  It may be that the Church in the New Testament era was home to a number of different organizational models and that only over time did the hierarchical model become normative.

The Revolution

            In any event, the Protestant Reformation disrupted the organizational unity of the Western Church and the classical episcopal system found itself rubbing shoulders (once again?) with other systems.  Those Protestant groups which had de facto control over a geographical area generally maintained some form of regional inter-congregational control: Calvinist synods in Scotland, Lutheran dioceses in Sweden, etc.  But other groups which were less numerous and thus less dominant (such as Baptists) were compelled to adopt congregational polity in which individual congregation, often separated by great distances, functioned independent of any overarching control.

The Baptist Mainstream

           Most Baptist churches continue to maintain congregational autonomy, allowing each church to govern itself.  Despite this, though, many churches choose to freely cooperate with other likeminded churches to advance causes beyond the reach of a single congregation including missions work, seminary and university education, and publishing.  These cooperating churches often organize themselves into loose, non-binding confederations to aid in this work.

Minority Reports

            Two distinct trends away from the aforementioned mainstream are apparent in modern Baptist life: one discouraging cooperation altogether and the other advocating a far more aggressive form of interconnectedness.

            The former trend is represented by so-called “hard shell” or anti-missionary Baptist churches and strident Independent Baptist churches that refuse to cooperate with other congregations either for matters of doctrine (hyper-Calvinism) or polity.

            The later trend takes two forms: episcopal Baptists and local churches employing a satellite campus model.  Episcopal Baptists are Baptist groups which have embraced the hierarchical model described above.  Major expressions of this tradition exist in Congo, Latvia, Georgia, and India.  The satellite campus model is largely an American experiment pursued by mega-churches in which a sermon is recorded at a central location and rebroadcast to a variety of satellite congregations under the central church’s control.

             The center of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ.  Christ’s life, death, and resurrection form the core of our beliefs and it’s only through His person and work that we are lead to other theological issues.  Of course, since Jesus’ actions lie in the distant past and He is no longer physically present to continue His teaching, a problem naturally arises: “How do we know anything about this Man who is the foundation of our spirituality?”

            Anticipating this question, Jesus called a community into being.  This community (the Church) remained in existence after Christ’s ascension and preserved the knowledge of His ministry in the form of sacred tradition which was handed on to posterity (1 Cor. 11:2).  At various points in the first century this oral tradition was written down and thus became written tradition about Jesus.  Eventually various examples of the written tradition (various individual books and letters of the New Testament) were brought together to form anthologies in different parts of the Church. This process of anthologizing continued through the third century until, essentially, all Christians affirmed the same basic collection of writings related to Jesus—what we now call the New Testament.  This collection of writings presupposed another collection, the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) so both collections were fused to produce the Bible.

            Of course the Church’s tradition continued to be promulgated independent of this central written record through teaching, preaching, singing, and so on.  And eventually, as traditions are inclined to do, the tradition evolved and diversified, leading to the existence of multiple and contradictory theologies within Christianity.  To meet this challenge, Baptists (as with many other Christians) asserted that the written tradition, the Bible, should be privileged over all other instances of the tradition since the Bible is fixed and early whereas other possible authorities are fluid and late.  This policy of asserting the Bible over against later examples of the tradition is know as the resort to “biblical authority”, or as it’s sometimes called, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

            While almost all Baptists would affirm the belief in biblical authority, this principle can be understood in a number of ways.  Some of these ways are helpful, and some are not.  Examples of each approach appear below.

“No Creed but the Bible”

            Some interpret the principle of biblical authority as a rejection of all other guiding documents and principles.  As such, these groups would consider themselves “anti-creedal” in that they refuse to use creeds (both ancient and modern) to define their identity.  The Baptist General Convention of Texas (along with other groups) distanced itself from the SBC on the grounds that the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message sounded like a creed and “Baptists don’t believe in creeds.”  Despite the no-nonsense appeal of this position, it suffers from a number of drawbacks.  First, the statement “I believe no creed but the Bible” is itself a creed (“creed” coming from credo which means, “I believe”) and is thus an apparent violation of its own principle.  Second, all sorts of groups claim to base their faith on the Bible alone only to create widely divergent ideologies (cp. Jehovah’s Witnesses and Lutherans).  It seems that at least some summary statement of what the Bible actually says is needed.  And third, all churches inevitably produce policies for guiding their operation that are not explicitly biblical (e.g. bylaws, usher rotation charts, etc).  Thus the “no creed but the Bible” slogan seems to be self-contradictory, unhelpful, and ultimately impossible.

“Norma Normans”

            Historically (and despite sometimes shrill claims to the contrary) Baptists have always been comfortable with creeds.  The first Baptist groups known to have existed developed statements of faith (e.g. the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, the Philadelphia Confession of 1742).  Some of these confessions, like the Orthodox Creed of 1678, even reproduce the three ancient creeds of Christianity: the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.  What’s more, the first meeting of the Baptist World Alliance, in 1905, began with a group recitation of the Apostles Creed.  What then of biblical authority?  In this context the Bible is seen as the ultimate standard and one from which summaries can be derived.  In so far as these derivative standards accord with the Bible they are legitimate.  Still excluded is any belief or practice which contradicts the Bible, the earliest and most reliable standard for Christian faith, either explicitly or in general character.