After our emergence in the 17th Century, Baptist communities in the British Isles existed in peace only after religious toleration became an accepted cultural attitude with legal and religious validity. For that reason liberty of conscience in matters relating to God has remained a core Baptist principle. Baptists were born in an age of zealous persecution, and like other dissenters suffered from religious intolerance. The Baptist conscience is therefore genetically predisposed to resist religious oppression, to refrain from judging the faith of others in ways that are obstructive or repressive.
More positively, Baptists who affirm liberty of conscience before God, gladly recognise and respect the work of God in the lives of others, even when their experience is different. "Baptist Catholicity" is a phrase being used increasingly to describe that way of being Baptist that traces our rootedness back into our own tradition, but then back further into the deeper loam of the Christian tradition in its rich diversity. A dissenting ecclesiology need not mean sectarian isolation, and a Baptist commitment to Christ-centred discipleship gives no mandate to disenfranchise other Christian traditions.
I was nudged, if not shoved, to think about all this late last night when I was reading Evelyn Underhill's book on worship. Written in 1936, against the darkening skies over Europe, by a middle-aged, middle class, genteel Anglican steeped in mystical theology, and conductor of refined devotional retreats in rural Pleshey, the book is one of the few credible attempts to describe what worship is from the perspective of one who understands transcendence, adoration, and the response of human finitude to the Eternal.
I don't know how many readers of this blog have ever read Evelyn Underhill. Not everyone is patient now with a style that can seem rarefied and lacking practical usefulness. What I like about her is that much of her writing does indeed lack practical usefulness! Instead she explores why the human heart must worship, and finds the answer in the nature of God, the attraction of Love Eternal, the innate response of human longing to the Word Incarnate.
So when I read Underhill's paragraph (cited below), I thought of why I am a Baptist, and why as a Baptist I am passionately outspoken about our traditional commitment to religious tolerance. And why in faithfulness to Christ and to the Church which is the Body of Christ, I am respectful and receptive to the truth of Christ as we encounter Him in the experience and faith of other Christians. Such Christ-centred openness to other Christians requires theological humility, a sense of our own need of the other, and a spiritual obedience to the apostolic logic of welcoming one another as God in Christ has welcomed us.
Evelyn Underhill, Worship (London:Nisbet, 1936), pages xi-xii."Some of the friends and fellow students who have read these chapters have been inclined to blame me for giving too sympathetic and uncritical an account of types of worship which are not their own. It has been pointed out to me that I have failed to denounce the shortcomings of Judaism with Christian thoroughness, that I have almost unnoticed primitive and superstitious elements which survive in Catholic and Orthodox worship, that I have not emphasized as I should the liturgic and sacramental shortcomings of the Protestant sects.
But my wish has been to show all these chapels of various types in the one Cathedral of the Spirit; and dwell on the particular structure of each, the love which has gone to their adornment, the shelter they can offer to many different kinds of adoring souls, not on the shabby hassocks, the crude pictures, or the paper flowers.
Each great form of Christian cultus is here regarded...as a "contemplation to procure the love of God"; for its object is to lead human souls, by different ways, to that act of pure adoration which is the consummation of worship".
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