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DALLAS–“Ever since conservatives regained control of the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination has found itself embroiled in a variety of theological controversies.” In his lead editorial for the new issue of the Criswell Theological Review, Editor R. Alan Streett recalls that critics claimed once the battle was won, conservatives would turn and start taking aim at each other.
“The prognostications were not far off the mark,” Streett notes, citing heated debates over egalitarianism, Calvinism, elder-rule, the Emergent church, social drinking and war policy. In the latest controversy within the SBC, speaking in tongues, CTR attempts “to separate fact from fiction” in the fall 2006 edition released on the 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, which introduced the Pentecostal Movement to America.
Criswell College humanities professor Barry K. Creamer avoids attacking either the sincerity or mode of expression of a half-billion people worldwide who claim to practice sign gifts through religious and emotional expressions.
“It must be admitted that there is no simple point-and-shoot passage to resolve the issue,” he writes, adding that most people readily admit some gifts and activities cease at some point.
“Even if one acquiesces that there is not a single, brief passage which pointedly addresses this issue, it is not the same as admitting that the Bible gives no direction to it,” Creamer says.
He prefers to frame the issue so that Scripture can address it, he states, by asking what is meant by a gift being supernatural or miraculous. He reduces the query further by asking whether God still gives supernatural gifts and whether he gives them as signs. Since sign gifts indicate apostolic authority, then any ongoing specific revelation today threatens the authority of the completed canon of Scripture, Creamer asserts.
Creamer walks the reader through a series of logical conclusions to answer the questions posed. Along the way he writes that “aberrant Christian practices” do not necessarily render the practitioners to be non-Christians.
“Whether charismatics of any brand have contributed positively to the culture or the kingdom is not in dispute here.”
In another CTR article, Edward Watson, assistant professor of biblical literature at Oral Roberts University, argues that the situation in which the SBC finds itself regarding its International Mission Board ruling on private prayer language reflects the ongoing tension over charismatic influence within the denomination over the last century. Among those Southern Baptists who at some time embraced modern Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal movements, he includes:
>John Osteen, who was pastor of Hibbard Memorial Baptist Church in Houston when he announced in 1958 that he had been baptized in the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues, and a year later began Lakewood Baptist Church. The church is now known as the interdenominational, charismatic Lakewood Church, where Osteen’s son, Joel, preaches his life-success message to 25,000 each week.
>James Robison, once a crusade evangelist who partnered with Southern Baptist churches throughout the Bible Belt until his announcement of deliverance from demonic oppression and support for some charismatic teachings caused many to stop supporting his evangelistic ministry. In the last decade Robison’s focus has shifted to a missions/relief program in Africa sustained by his television audience;
>Ron Phillips, once the trustee chairman of the North American Mission Board and president of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, led Central Baptist Church near Chattanooga to become known as Abba House to bring “a balance to both evangelicals and charismatics as we operate in the gifts of the Spirit while firly holding to the Word of God” after he reported speaking in tongues in 1989.
Watson writes that Phillips said it should be nobody’s business whether or not a missionary candidate uses a private prayer language, stating that half the international mission force “operates in the power of the Spirit.”
Watson observes that while Southern Baptists were initially open to “manifestations of the Spirit” such as the practice of laying on of hands, cessationism took hold to view signs and wonders as limited the early church during the apostolic age. Still, he argues, Pentecostal churches have probably won more converts from among Baptists that any Protestant groups in the United States. He cites a conclusion of historian Vinson Synan and a 1979 Gallup poll in which 20 percent of all Baptists in the U.S. viewed themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic Christians.
Describing that minority view as “an extreme dichotomy within the SBC,” Watson says it indicates “strong feelings among Baptists over this delicate and divisive issue.”
Further evidence of his claim is offered through reference to a resolution offered in the annual SBC meeting of 1971 to exclude all charismatic churches from fellowship—a proposal that was defeated by messengers, and the dismissal of Southern Baptist missionaries to Singapore in 1995 for their open acceptance of charismatic practices.
Watson draws from the testimony Phillips offered in his book “Awakened by the Spirit,” to conclude, “In the end, many charismatic Baptists retain a hope that the SBC will abandon its hard stance toward its charismatic brethren and find that ‘the Baptist tent’ is big enough to ‘embrace evangelical doctrines and, at the same time, welcome the Spirit’s move.’”
Paul G. Chappell, vice president of The King’s College and Seminary in Van Nuys, Calif., offers a Pentecostal perspective of tongues as the initial evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. His paper explains the roots of the Pentecostal Movement out of the American Holiness Movement, which redirected the biblical focus of John Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection from a focus on cleansing and purification to the baptism of the Holy Ghost and Pentecostal power.
“It was the early Pentecostals’ ardent belief in the authority of Scripture and their experience of living in the midst of a powerless, impotent Christianity that created their desire to return to the primitive Apostolic era—to leap back in history to Pentecost in the book of Acts and to immediately reconnect with the God or the New Testament that demonstrated he was in living communion with humankind,” Chappell explains.
Tongues as evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit was the doctrinal marker that separated the new Pentecostals from their birthing holiness community, he writes before further exploring that distinctive in the article.
Roger E. Olson of Truett Seminary in Waco offers “Confessions of a Post-Pentecostal Believer in the Charismatic Gifts,” giving a firsthand account of his childhood experience and college training among Pentecostals. While careful to write that not all Pentecostals are guilty of anti-intellectualism, Olson states that attitude pervades the movement to some degree.
Eventually, he found more in common spiritually and theologically with Baptists of North American Baptist Seminary where he studied while serving at an independent Pentecostal Charismatic church. Along the way, he observed, “Pentecostal hermeneutics is seriously flawed insofar as it attempts to base that doctrine [that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit] on a pattern allegedly found in the book of Acts.”
After briefly teaching at Oral Roberts University, Olson began a 15-year stint teaching theology at the Baptist-related Bethel College in St. Paul.
“Throughout my time at Bethel I drifted farther away from my Pentecostal roots, while I watched it making inroads into mainline evangelicalism. The whole phenomenon of ‘contemporary worship’ which focuses on ‘praise and worship’ choruses is influence by Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement and the Jesus People Movement. An anti-intellectual influx of theology into evangelicalism which focuses on inwardness and subjectivism came in large part from Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement,” he concludes.
CTR’s Streett interviewed Criswell College alumnus Tom Hatley, who chaired the IMB trustees when that passed a policy excluding the appointment of practitioners or promoters of tongues, including a private prayer language. The Arkansas pastor states that action was an addition “to the many qualifiers which are used to help applicants for mission service to determine Whether or not the IMB is the right choice for them in their calling to mission service.”
Hatley states he researched how the Southern Baptist mission board had handled appointment of people as missionaries who spoke in tongues, finding staff leadership had little tolerance for anything that resembled Pentecostal theology in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.
Hatley remarks: “Back then no one had even heard of private prayer language. The private use of tongues was simply seen as just a different use of tongues. In short, no one was knowingly appointed with any such beliefs and few even applied.”
When a popular couple was turned down for appointment in 1987 because they claimed a privte use of tongues, Hatley writes that the term was introduced to trustees, prompting staff to recommend in 1989 that candidates claiming such a gift should explain its use by way of a letter. In 1992 a Mission Personnel Committee asking for an update was told people who spoke in tongues would not be commissioned, but those using tongues in their prayer closet would, Hatley recalls.
A decade later a subcommittee studied the issue over a three-year period, leading to the vote in 2005 passed by three-fourths of the trustees.
The interview with Hatley is one of several CTR articles available online at www.criswelljournal.com, in addition to CTR Extras where Internet readers can post responses. One of the earliest posts is by IMB trustee Wade Burleson of Oklahoma, who disputes Tom Hatley’s representation of tongues only as a known language.
Hatley tells Streett, “I am one of those who believe that there is still a strong majority of Southern Baptists who think that modern charismatic practices are not part of our history or our distinctives. There has been a growing number in the last two decades who have sensed the need for an accommodation of such practices into our churches and agencies.”
He says he believes the trend is driven by a desire for acceptance in the greater evangelical community where, according to Chappell, Pentecostal communities of faith represent the largest portion of the National Association of Evangelicals membership.
A second preoccupation with numbers “caused many churches to no longer make theology an essential concern for its members, at least on the front end of membership,” Hatley writes. He says many pastor friends are expressing regret in recent days for not making membership more meaningful.
“Many are seeing that a large membership does not make a church strong without a common theology that produces unity.”
Responding to those who charge that the SBC is moving out of the mainstream of evangelicalism, narrowing the doctrinal lines on secondary issues and making it difficult to do evangelism in a postmodern context, Hatley disagrees. Instead, he said evangelicalism is drifting left, causing Southern Baptists to appear less in the mainstream due to no fault of their own. Hatley argued that Southern Baptist have always held to “the right edge” of the mainstream.
“In fact, I see Southern Baptist as the anchor for the evangelical community. If we drift to center stream we send the whole community even further left and weaken Christianity around the world.”
He writes that several years of study, teaching and preaching from God’s Word about the New Testament gifts would be healthy for Southern Baptists.
“Many have seen this day coming for a long time, and the strong emotional objections of some regarding the IMB policy merely reveal the reason we have not heretofore dealt with it.”
Hatley also says IMB trustees knew there would be a strong response and initially sought to avoid conflict. “Well, that is not impossible; so, let’s take a breath and deal with it.”
