I concur with your editorial suggesting a year should elapse
between the presentation of the report on the Baptist Faith and Message and
the time messengers vote. I fear many messengers will not have seen the report
and will not have studied the document. An issue of this importance deserves
a one-year delay.
I concur with your editorial suggesting a year should
elapse between the presentation of the report on the Baptist Faith and Message
and the time messengers vote. I fear many messengers will not have seen the
report and will not have studied the document. An issue of this importance deserves
a one-year delay.
In spite of the fact that the committee has claimed
to have great respect for the preamble of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message
and their efforts to retain much of that significant part, I am concerned that
the paragraph in the 1963 statement about the souls competency before
God and the priesthood of the believer has been omitted. So important was that
to the 1963 committee that chairman Dr. Herschel Hobbs wrote a large portion
of his first chapter in The Baptist Faith and Message study book about
that doctrine. He referred to Baptists belief about the souls competency
and priesthood of the believer as the rock from whence they are hewn.
He said that had the paragraph on soul competency and the priesthood of the
believer not been in the preamble messengers likely would not have accepted
the 1963 revision.
The 1966 revision of Hobbs book still has
those strong statements of support for that as a foundational issue in all that
we believe. What could have happened in four years to make such an emphasis
unnecessary or of no importance in the Baptist Faith and Message? I still believe
that soul competency and priesthood of the believer represent a number one distinctive
of Southern Baptists. I still teach it as such.
The framers of the current recommendation need not
fear that doctrine, especially if all the safeguards included in the Hobbs chapter
are understood. We can still trust an.