Being baptist - an exercise in persuasive humility

I am a Baptist, which doesn't make me any better than any other Christian seeking to live faithfully for Christ within their own tradition. Nor does it guarantee that my theology is any more securely right or doctrinally orthodox than other Christian expressions of faith. And my spirituality, though grown in Baptist soil, is in fact a veritable cottage garden of colours and varieties planted from my own tradition and transplanted from others, and a mixture of overgrown abundance and well controlled tidiness. Nor does being a Baptist commit me to rubbishing, or challenging or choosing to be ignorant of other Christian traditions, expressions and ways of being the Church of Jesus Christ.

No, being a Baptist is an exercise in persuasive humility, acknowledging our limitations but also commending the peculiar perspectives we bring to Christian life and practice. Being a Baptist compels me to ask questions about the relations of church and state; to uphold religious liberty for all; to affirm the nature of faith as a personal response to Jesus that isn't only about what I believe, but has transformative power over character and patterns of behaviour; it compels also an embracing of life-shaping Gospel values such as peacemaking, reconciliation, community building and compassionate service.

Baptist identity is moving to the centre of our denominational thinking. That's why I am writing the disclaimers above. There is all the difference in the world between a denomination so insecure that it bangs on about its own rightness; and a denomination that values who it is and was called to be under Christ, and doesn't have to undervalue other traditions to do so. Where all this will take us I don't know. For myself, I long for a rediscovery of Christian existence shaped by the core Baptist affirmation that "The Lord Jesus Christ our God and Saviour is the sole and absolute Authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures". When the Sermon on the Mount has the same purchase on our thinking and living as Paul's Romans; when the parables are as life-shaping as the epistles; when the example and teaching, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus are seen as the treasured truths of a faith that lives only by that name, Jesus Christ. If that is secured, most other things are too.

Comments

[chris]

When I read this, and the post that precedes it, and in fact great chunks of your blog, it keeps hitting me that it's absurd that you call yourself a Baptist and I call myself an Episcopalian. There is far too much we share - and I'm going beyond the basic tenets of faith here - for us to be described as different. "Our sad divisions" are just that - and in this time they are also absurd. Aren't they?