Lutheran Church Missouri Synod

The Baptists

By Dr. Richard P. Bucher

(With Special Focus on the Southern Baptist Convention)
 

Demographics

In the United States there are an estimated 27,800,000 Christians who call themselves Baptist spread out in 19 different groups or associations. The largest Baptist group (and the largest Protestant church body in the United States) is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which has 15,851,756 members in 41,099 churches. See the attached sheet for a listing of each of the nineteen Baptist groups.

Origin

There are several theories on the origin of the Baptists. The most convincing theory, and the one that most Baptist historians hold, is that Baptists originated from the English Separatist (Congregationalist) movement at the end of the Sixteenth Century. Robert Browne and John Smyth are often viewed as fathers of the Baptist church. The first English Baptists were General (Arminian) Baptists. 1644 is often viewed as the year of origin for the Baptist churches. It was in that year that the particular (Calvinist) Baptist churches authored the London Confession. This confession stated their faith and rejected the teachings of the Anabaptists and the General Baptists. Note: John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, was a General Baptist; Charles Haddon Spurgeon was a Particular Baptist. The General and Particular Baptists of England united in 1891. It is usually held that the first Baptist congregations in the United States were in Newport, Rhode Island (1638) and Providence, Rhode Island (1639).

Baptist Distinctives

All Baptists believe in the supreme competency and autonomy of each individual Christian to interpret the Bible for himself. Neither creeds, clergy, confessions, councils nor any church organization has authority over the conscience of the individual Baptist. Understandably, this has led to a wide variety of theological views, and one will find both liberal and conservative Baptists, who refer to themselves as Calvinist or Arminian or fundamentalist. Because of their understanding of the full autonomy of individuals to interpret Scripture for themselves, Baptists are anticreedal and antidenominational. They refuse to force their members to subscribe to creeds or confessions of any kind. They also reject denominationalism, because of the danger of having a central authority. They refer to themselves as “associations,” “conventions,” or “conferences.”

The second Baptist distinctive is that the Bible is viewed as the sole source and authority for all Christian faith and life. Most Baptists believe in verbal inspiration and the inerrancy of the Bible (as do members of the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod). Following Calvinism, Baptists have tended to be very literalistic and legalistic in interpreting the Bible. Many of them have followed the principle that whatever is not specifically commanded in the Bible is sinful.

Most Baptists insist on Baptism by immersion. Baptists believe that individual congregations have complete and total authority. No external authority can dictate to them what they are to believe or how they are to worshp. Their polity is strongly congregational and individualistic. Most Baptists (including the SBC) heavily stress that personal evangelism is a duty that each Christian must do.

Southern Baptist Convention

The theological position of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a form of modified Calvinism. What follows below is a listing of the SBC’s teachings. All quotations are from the “2000 Baptist Faith and Message” statement of faith.

Bible

The SBC holds that Bible “was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.” Also, “All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.” The LCMS would agree with both of these statements. We would add that Scripture contains two distinct words of God, namely, the Law and the Gospel.

Jesus Christ

The SBC teaches that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, true God and true man; that he obeyed God’s Law perfectly and was without sin. That his death on the cross was a substitutionary death which atoned for the sins of the whole world.

Man and Original Sin

About “man” the SBC teaches that “Man is the special creation of God, made in his own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation. In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and environment inclined toward sin.” With all this Lutherans in the LCMS would agree. We would not agree with the following statement, however, since it teaches that God holds people accountable for their sins only when they reach an age of moral choice or reason (age of accountability): “Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation.” The Bible nowhere teaches an age of accountability.

Salvation

The SBC correctly teaches that salvation “is offered freely to all who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, who by his own blood obtained eternal redemption for the believer.” And “there is no salvation apart from personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord.” The Bible does not teach, however, that “Faith is the acceptance of Jesus Christ and commitment of the entire personality to Him as Lord and Savior.” To say that faith is the “commitment of the entire personality to Him” is to turn faith into a good work. Rather, faith is receiving Christ as one’s Savior, or believing the promise of the Gospel of free salvation through Christ. With the SBC’s definition, no one could ever be certain whether he had faith or not. This is a confusion of justification and sanctification.

Predestination and Perseverance

The SBC correctly teaches that all Christians have been elected from eternity and that no one can be saved apart from God’s grace. They do not teach double predestination. They are in error, however, when they teach that “All true believers endure to the end” and “will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end.” The Bible does not teach “once saved-always saved.”
 

Clergy

The SBC teaches that the only scriptural offices in the church are pastors and deacons. Women may serve in the church, but not in the office of Pastor. They are one of a very few church bodies (along with the LCMS) that have not caved in to the demand to ordain women as Pastors.

Baptism

The SBC teaches that “Christian baptism is the immersion of a believer in water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” They insist on immersion, which the Bible does not do. It is wrong to make a law out of something that the Bible does not command. Whereas the Bible teaches that Baptism is God’s mighty work of grace by which he saves sinners by faith, the SBC wrongly teaches that Baptism “is an act of obedience symbolizing the believer’s faith in a crucified, buried, and risen Saviour, the believer’s death to sin, the burial of the old life, and the resurrection to walk in newness of life in Christ Jesus.” This turns Baptism into a good work that we offer God. Baptism is not a mere symbol, but a means of saving grace. Baptism saves and causes one to be born again. The SBC refuses to baptize babies, which they believe to be incapable of faith or moral choice. The SBC refers to Baptism as an “ordinance” rather than a “sacrament.”
 

The Lord’s Supper

It is well known that the SBC rejects the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in and with the bread and the wine. Their teaching is that the bread and “fruit of the vine” merely symbolize Christ’s body and blood. Even worse, they deny that the Lord’s Supper gives grace, forgiveness, or the strengthening of faith. They turn the Lord’s Supper into our work of obedience, when according to Scripture it is God’s work of grace. In the Lord’s Supper, God is the giver, we are the receivers by faith. Lutheran view this as contradicting the incarnation and the Gospel. In their words, “The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.” The SBC uses grape juice, rather than wine, arguing that the drinking of any wine is sinful, and that Jesus used grape juice when he instituted the Lord’s Supper. This is an impossibility since a method of preserving unfermented grape juice was not discovered until the late Nineteenth Century. The SBC tends toward close communion. They call the Lord’s Supper an ordinance rather than a sacrament.

Social Issues

The SBC states, “All Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society.” In addition they “oppose racism, every form of greed, selfishness, and vice, and all forms of sexual immorality, including adultery, homosexuality, and pornography.” Moreover, they teach that all Christians should “speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.” They have also defined the family as being “composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood, or adoption.” They also teach the husband and wife are of equal worth before God and endorse the Biblical teaching of male headship in the marriage. With this the LCMS heartily agrees.