February 26, 2001
Faith statement not creedal, Hemphill says
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___FORT WORTH--The revised Baptist Faith & Message is not being forced on anyone, and requiring faculty at Southern Baptist Convention seminaries to sign it should not alarm anyone, according to Ken Hemphill, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
___Hemphill has written two articles about the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message, both posted on the seminary's website and mailed by others in printed form to some Texas churches.
___One article is titled "Is the Baptist Faith & Message Creedal?" and the other "Is the 2000 Confession Guilty of Bibliolatry?"
___Meanwhile, a Georgia pastor whose writings Hemphill cites as an example of why changes were necessary in the Baptist Faith & Message has charged the seminary president with misrepresenting his writings. And a former Southwestern professor cited in one of Hemphill's articles also has said his work has been misused.
___"Some among us love to use sound bites to create fear," Hemphill says in introducing the second of his articles.
___He then accuses critics of the Baptist Faith & Message revisions of instilling fear in Baptist people with misinformation, particularly their insistence the revised faith statement is being used as a creed.
___"No one can be coerced into believing this confession of faith, but it is appropriate for those who work for convention agencies and institutions to be held accountable to the statement of their convention," Hemphill asserts.
___Critics of the SBC's changes to the Baptist Faith & Message, including leaders of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, have said SBC seminary professors should not be required to sign the new faith statement, which they view as not a consensus statement but a narrow and controversial statement.
___Hemphill also addresses critics who have lamented the deletion of a line from the 1963 Baptist Faith & Message that "Jesus Christ is the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted."
___"The 'criterion' language was being used by some unprincipled Baptist scholars to ignore difficult texts, which they did not believe to reflect the character of Jesus," Hemphill asserts. This "loophole to avoid the plain teaching of certain biblical texts persists among moderates," he charges.
___His only example is one sentence from a book by Jeff Pool, a former professor at Southwestern who now teaches at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University. "Jeff Pool plainly stated that the criterion language was included in the 1963 confession largely in response to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Ralph Elliott's claim that Melchizidek was a priest of Baal," Hemphill writes.
___Pool said he is not sure whether Hemphill intended to lump him in the category of the "unprincipled scholars" to whom he refers or intended to use Elliott as an example of an "unprincipled scholar."
___In either case, Hemphill is wrong and has confused the debate with ambiguous statements, Pool said.
___"If Hemphill intentionally injected this ambiguity into his allusion to my study, ... he has willfully distorted communication of the facts and truth, with the aim of deceiving some Baptists by defaming others."
___The line from Pool's book about Elliott was not Pool's own words but was a quote from Herschel Hobbs, chairman of the 1963 Baptist Faith & Message study committee.
___Apart from whatever he was attempting to say about Elliott, "Hemphill has failed to offer any example whatsoever of the so-called 'unprincipled Baptist scholars' or moderates whom he accuses of misusing Jesus Christ as the criterion by which to interpret the Christian Scriptures," Pool said.
___Also in the article, Hemphill compares the theology of Baptist moderates to the views of a female pastor he once heard on a television news program. This woman justified her service as a pastor by noting Jesus never addressed the issue of women in ministry, he said.
___In his view, that discounts the teaching of the Apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 2:12, Hemphill said, and makes Paul's teaching less important Jesus'.
___"The whole of biblical revelation and not some vaguely defined canon of Jesus has always been the definitive authority for historic Baptists," he writes.
___He further explains the changes were necessary to eliminate the possibility anyone might use the "experience of Jesus as the criterion by which we judge the biblical text."
___He cites a Bible study lesson written by Bob Setzer, pastor of First Baptist Church of Macon, Ga., and published by the Baptist Center for Ethics.
___"Setzer argues that Jesus issued a simple two-word creed, 'Follow me,'" Hemphill reports. "Do you see the danger in Setzer's argument? Which Christ are we to follow? Do we follow the Jesus of Mormonism or the Jesus of the New Age movement?"
___Setzer wrote Hemphill a letter accusing him of misrepresenting his writings. "The thrust of the lesson argued that at its heart, the Christian faith is a dynamic, unfolding process of knowing, loving and following Jesus," Setzer stated. "Can this Jesus be divorced from Scripture? Absolutely not! Nothing I said suggested otherwise."
___Setzer explains that his quarrel is not with the Bible but "with those who place creedal formulations between the believer and the Scripture."
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