Rogers kept SBC’s steering wheel turned to the right

Posted: 11/18/05

Rogers kept SBC's steering
wheel turned to the right

By Bob Allen

EthicsDaily.com

MEMPHIS, Tenn.–Three-time Southern Baptist Conven-tion President Adrian Rogers, whose 1979 election sparked a revolutionary leadership change in America's largest Protestant denomination, died Nov. 15.

Rogers, 74, suffered from colon cancer and pneumonia.

Rogers was the first of a string of SBC presidents elected in what supporters called the “conservative resurgence” and hailed as a return to the denomination's historical, conservative roots.

Progressive and mainstream Baptists described a fundamentalist takeover, marked by a decade of character assassination and political dirty tricks.

In a 1979 sermon, Rogers outlined an ideal of all Southern Baptist churches as having a pastor “who believes in the inerrant, infallible word of God.” He cited an appeal to cast out the “liberal rattlesnakes and termites” in the convention.

Rogers' SBC election set up a string of presidential wins by fundamentalist pulpiteers, who for 15 years energized the conservative movement with sermons defending the Bible as “inerrant”–meaning literally true in every word–and denouncing those who disagreed as “liberals.”

In their 1999 book, In the Name of the Father, Carl Kell and Raymond Camp, both communications professors and lifelong Baptists, said moderates failed to come up with a counter-rhetoric to the theme of an “error-free” Bible trumpeted by charismatic SBC presidents such as Rogers, Bailey Smith and Jerry Vines.

“From a rhetorical perspective, the victory of the battle was won on national rostrums in the sermons of the presidents,” they wrote. “For 15 years, the leaders of the Southern Baptist Conven-tion produced the finest defense of pulpit sermons on a single theme that had ever been seen or heard in the 150-year history of the denomination.”

In 1980, Rogers set the tone for future leaders in the first president's address of the inerrantist movement. In a sermon titled “The Decade of Decision and the Doors of Destiny,” Rogers quoted Bible verses describing Scripture as the word of God, God-breathed, God-given, eternal and, therefore, perfect.

“So, when we speak of the Bible as 'truth, without any mixture of error' (from the 1963 Baptist Faith & Message) we are referring to the original manuscripts,” he said. “The Holy Spirit guarded the original writers from error.”

Rogers' rhetoric went far beyond the spotlight of the annual convention, however.

He once told ministers in a discussion of academic freedom that professors at Southern Baptist seminaries should be required to teach “whatever they are told to teach. And if we tell them to teach that pickles have souls, then they must teach that pickles have souls.”

Rogers made his voice heard on the SBC Peace Committee, appointed in 1985 to determine the sources and solutions to the SBC controversy. Among findings reported to the convention in 1987 was that most Southern Baptists believed Adam and Eve were real people, that the books of the Bible were written by the authors they are attributed to, that miracles described in Scripture actually occurred and that history in the Bible is accurate and reliable.

“We call upon Southern Baptist institutions to recognize the great number of Southern Baptists who believe this interpretation of our confessional statement and, in the future, to build their professional staffs and faculties from those who clearly reflect such dominant convictions and beliefs held by Southern Baptists at large,” the committee recommended.

Rogers chaired another committee charged with revising the Baptist Faith & Message in 2000. Revisions included altering a statement from the 1963 version on Scripture that read, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted in Jesus Christ” and adding a sentence on the church that says, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”

In addition to shifting SBC theology, Rogers' presidency also started a trend toward political alliances with the far right.

During a visit to the White House in 1979, Rogers told President Jimmy Carter, a lifelong Baptist whose 1976 campaign introduced the term “born again” into America's political lexicon, “Mr. President, I hope you will give up your secular humanism and return back to Christianity.”

Rogers stressed a pastor's duty is to influence his church members' political decisions, but it can be done without endorsing a specific candidate, which under IRS regulations a church cannot do without losing its tax-exempt status. If a pastor “has done his job,” Rogers wrote, “his members will prayerfully and correctly use the standard of God's word to select the right candidate.”

Rogers opposed the rise of Calvinism, which has been embraced by a number of younger SBC leaders. He argued the Bible says nothing about God picking only a selected few to go to heaven while willing for the rest of the world to perish.

A native of Florida, Rogers was pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in the Memphis, Tenn., area from 1972 until March 2005. During his tenure, membership grew from 9,000 to 29,000, and the church relocated to the suburbs.