The Baptist Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention

Rating:
Summary: How Philistines destroyed our denomination for personal gain
Review: As a lifelong Baptist I am ashamed that someone would write a book glorifying how fundammentalists overtook our convention for their own personal gain. Before the takeover, our seminaries were world-class institutions educating and empowering men AND women to serve our Lord according to their own conscience as led by the Holy Spirit. Now our seminaries are a laughing stock and nothing but glorified bible colleges. All employees must affirm their allegience to the "Baptist Faith and Message", a creed that is amended at the convention leader's every whim and is placed above the Bible and Christ as our guide for faith and practice. (The SBC recently deleated from the BF&M the provision that Jesus Christ is the criteria for interpreting scripture-I guess now our enlighted clergy have usurped that role from him). This book is nothing but propaganda from those who stole our convention.

Rating:
Summary: Great Overview of the Situation
Review: As a young minister, I did not even know there was a controversy until it was nearly ten years old. I realize that this book was written by someone who would be considered a conservative, but his treatment of the information was factual and kind. He did not set out on a campaign to ruin anybody. The first couple of chapters are very in depth and one could get lost in them, but after that, the material is easier to comprehend and better reading.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Resource
Review: Before going into much detail about the book, I should admit that I am a conservative Southern Baptist pastor. Obviously, therefore, I am not impartial as regards the content of this history. I have read a number of histories covering all or a part of the conservative resurgence which has taken place in the SBC. Most have been from a moderate viewpoint, though Paul Pressler's "A Hill On Which To Die" is quite conservative. This book not only details the events from a conservative viewpoint, it also covers the subject matter in greater depth than Pressler - as one might assume given that his book is more personal in nature. I would recommend this fact-laden book as a resource to any Southern Baptist - and most especially to SBC pastors. On a few occasions (more frequently towards the end of the book than at first) the author makes guesses regarding motivations which are subjective in nature. Although I agree he is likely correct, these suppositions seem unnecessary given the wealth of objective, factual information included. Overall, it is not nearly so slanted as many other Church History books I have read. I enjoyed it and will no doubt reread it again in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly documented, fair, and reasonable account
Review: Dr. Jerry Sutton chronicles one of the most remarkable church movements in the late twentieth century: the reformation of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). This was remarkable because it was so exceptional, against the trends of nearly every other "mainline" denomination and Western culture as a whole. Sutton, who earned a Ph.D. in church history and is a Southern Baptist pastor, offers us here the first major, formal account of the "conservative resurgence" that I know of from the conservative (or evangelical) side. Until this book, "the controversy," as Southern Baptists called it, had been interpreted by self-described "moderates" with predictably skewed perspectives. One such "moderate" account, Bill Leonard's God's Last and Only Hope makes a suitable contrast to Sutton's evangelical view.

Sutton's account, as a "participant observer," is divided into four sections. The first describes the shabby theological and institutional condition into which he believes the SBC had fallen under "moderate" leadership. Proving that some of the professors in the seminaries and agencies in the bureaucracy had strayed far from the will of the SBC, as expressed in resolutions at their annual convention and their Baptist Faith and Message (their de facto creed) is essential to his case that conservatives were not just out for power but driven by a passion to restore the evangelical faith. I believe Sutton proved his point. The second part chronicles the way the SBC began to change. He describes the elections of successive conservative presidents to the SBC since 1979 and the opposition they met from incensed "moderates." Here we get a glimpse of the fervent politicking that swept the SBC. Sutton shows that despite the "moderate" charges that the conservatives were playing dirty politics, the "moderates", if anything, were more political. As a student in a SBC college during "the controversy," I remember some of the "moderate" religion professors using our class time for partisan ecclesiastical politics and derisive remarks about the "fundamentalists." The third part records the resistance of the entrenched bureaucracy to the conservative changes, including one SBC agency that continued to use denominational funds to advocate the legitimacy of abortion despite increasingly pro-life resolutions by the annual convention. In the fourth part, Sutton interprets the key issues that were at stake. He emphasizes that the "conservative resurgence" was genuinely motivated by a concern to restore faithful adherence to the reliability of scripture, especially in SBC seminaries.

Sutton's book is not as polemical as one would expect. He does not even take full advantage of all the contradictions the "moderates" are shown to be guilty of. Instead he allows the new president of Southern seminary, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., to tell us about "the fundamentalism of the left" - the liberal tendency to talk about "tolerance" and "diversity" while excluding conservatives. He also records, but does not exploit, the way the "moderates" hid behind SBC bureaucracies before the conservative resurgence and then suddenly wanted to change the rules to protect themselves after the conservatives began to take over. In addition, he shows how the "moderates" used denominational loyalty to attack the conservative movement during the early years of the resurgence but quickly formed splinter groups, even a shadow denomination (the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship - CBF), after it was clear the conservatives had won. Sutton does not use his admission to a bias as a license to commit character assassination.

Incidentally, since the publication of Sutton's book, Bill Leonard has become, as dean at Wake Forest, a champion for legitimizing homosexuality within the church and over 41% of the CBF voted to affirm homosexuality with many in the majority voting against the measure simply because they were afraid of losing financial support, points conveniently overlooked by news reports from the Baptist General Conference of Texas - BGCT (allied, unofficially, with the "moderates"). That leaders of the "moderates," as now found in the CBF and BGCT, have so quickly moved to affirm what the Bible condemns as perversion reveals that the "conservative" concerns which motivated the reformation were Biblically grounded all along.

Sutton's book is, at points, awkwardly worded and occasionally repetitious. (Often this is the result of fully quoting or paraphrasing other people.) Sutton's analysis could have been more supple at points, turning the "moderates'" arguments on their heads. For example, he simply dismisses Leonard's proposition that the SBC controversy was caused by a change in American culture. Leornard seems to think that excuses the "moderate" and liberal theological deviance. I wish Sutton had explored the point further, perhaps granting it to Leonard but then defined liberalism, as has Professor Robert Yarbrough of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, as that theological movement which allows the secular culture to be normative. In addition, I would have liked to have seen some reflection on what exactly the Baptist claim to "have no creed but the Bible" means. This is at the crux of the controversy. Sutton and the conservatives were certainly right to reject the "moderates'" implicit claim that such a position allows them to take any position, even those explicitly rejecting the veracity of scripture. Unfortunately, Sutton does not describe in positive terms what it means in practice. However, Sutton has given us a valuable text not only about America's largest Protestant denomination but about the nature of and resistance to reform movements.

Rating:
Summary: Applause!
Review: Sutton places before us a work of epic proportions. In his detailed examination of the events that led to the Conservative resurgence, Sutton's courage shines. Perhaps instead of castigating him for the exposure of such men that stood in the way of the Conservative conviction, we should applaud his bravery to "take the bull by the horns." Some have expressed their complaints with his candor and have questioned the virtue of this book. However, in spite of these accusations, those who know him best attest to his impeccable integrity and character. The old adage proves to be true: "If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one who barks is the one who got hit!" We are in need of more men who have the audacity to point out the "black and white." What Sutton has done is explain the way in which the largest Protestant organization in the world was revived through the work of courageous men, the unwavering commitment to fight for truth, and ultimately, the Hand of God.

With scholarly accuracy, Sutton gives us a book that supercedes its expectations. This work must be read by all serious students of Christian History. It should become required textbook material for Southern Baptist Seminaries, Universities, and Colleges. This writing has not yet reached its full effect. However, we can be confident that in the days ahead, The Baptist Reformation will prove itself to be a classic!

T. Michael Law

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous work
Review: Until tonight, after having read Jerry Sutton's 485-page, maddening account of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, I held a fairly innocuous opinion of the author as a mostly pathetic, bumbling wannabe in the Baptist political machinery. He's always been for me the Dan Quayle of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, with his big goofy grin in ridiculous television commercials for his large church. Don't get me wrong, just cause a man's file cabinet's empty doesn't mean he won't make a good minister. But it does mean that somebody in the offices upstairs ought to have saved him from himself when he decided to pen a definitive, scholarly history of events for which he was himself one of the yipping hangers-on. This book would be good for more unintended laughs if it wasn't so offensive, from the very title, which makes the not-so-subtle comparison of the recent hostile political takeover to the Lutheran Reformation, for God's sakes. What a gas! (I'm not sure which one of the cronies gets to be Martin Luther in this re-enactment...do you think if he was around, Martin Luther would be clamoring to get the 10 commandments nailed to the public school door? Nah..he'd probably be too caught up in the Disney boycott to have time for that...) In the Preface, Jerry notes that he "learned the hard way, doing a Ph.D dissertation, that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity." Thus freed of the bothersome constraints of something as silly as objectivity (in a history?), he decided to go ahead while he was at it and discard consistency, and most other basic forms of logic too, as well as a few petty conventions like grammar and spelling from time to time. This book is hilariously partisan in its contradictions. 289 mind-numbing pages in, Jerry scolds then-President of the Sunday School Board, Lloyd Elder, for "simply blowing off" a complaint of Paige Patterson's "and dismissing him as someone concerned about nothing of consequence." But when Morris Chapman (the Lenny to Sutton's Squiggy) responded to the "numerous letters complaining about the conservative domination in the Southern Baptist Convention" with a form letter which read, in part, "Thank you for sharing your heartfelt convictions. For the sake of Christ's Kingdom and our Southern Baptist witness, it is important that we talk, think, and pray with one another...", our astute historian (fresh from the blisters of "doing" his dissertation I suppose) concludes that Chapman "displays an amazing gracefulness..." in his reply. Ha! For those not in the know, the difference between Dr. Lloyd Elder and Morris Chapman is that historian Sutton helped fire Dr. Elder, while buddy Chapman was actually called upon to write one of the glowing reviews in the front of this book! No kidding! How cool is it to be able to sell an admitedly biased history by getting all the guys you portray as heroes to write the jacket reviews! Brilliant! Nobody's ever said anything that good about them in print before! Of course they loved it! There's material that hilarious all the way through! This morose account reads more like an autopsy than a history...full of gripping, fundamentalist reasoning. He justifies the purposeful infusion of crass political machinery into denominational work, for example, with the oh-so-Christian "they started it" defense. "There has always been a group of people controlling appointments and controlling nominations," he says on p. 49 (although he contradicts this 16 pages later when he reveals that it was Bill Powell, in 1977, who "discovered in the Constitution and the Bylaws of the Convention, the appointive powers of the Presidency). Mr. Sutton hardly even tries to hide the arrogant, smug, piety of this well-documented fundamentalist hijacking. He uplifts - in an "expression of gratitude" - a group of thugs (let's face it) who clearly thrive under fear and paranoia..power-hungry, repressed, insecure men driven by a need for domination, and fueled by a rhetorical confidence that it matters little how they treat their fellow man so long as they do it in the name of God. That's the oldest story in the history of the world (usually the sex is better). I'm talking about guys who would have their own children leather-bound if they thought it would make them look more holy....guys whose sign-off in correspondence is: "Until He comes...". What kind of person says things like that? This book fails because its author fails to recognize that characters like that make better villains than heroes -- and for good reason. It fails because it is utterly, ubiquitously self-serving in its objects of praise and its objects of underhanded ridicule and humiliation. But most of all...this book fails because it is so completely boring. There is page afer page of repetition, of unimportant, uninteresting letters quoted in their entirety, of asides with no purpose. This is a book with no fewer than 36 quotations, totaling over 400 lines of text, from Richard Land, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, whose well-known rhetorical strategy is to bore his adversary into submission. Not surprisingly, Land's inside-cover review of this book was an absolute rave! Hilarious! It is often said - as a dubious compliment - that some have a face for radio. After suffering Jerry Sutton's foray into academia, I can say - with all due sincerity and Christian compassion - that he has a mind that was made for television. I suggest that he stay, and continue to do the work of the Lord from there. I'm only sorry 1 star is the lowest rating here. Until He comes, Don Byrd