Baptists in the Balance: The Tension Between Freedom and Responsibility

Baptists in the Balance: The Tension Between Freedom and Responsibility. Edited by Everett C. Goodwin, foreword by Bill Moyers. Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1997, 416 pp. paper.

The subtitle of this collection of essays expresses the major concern of the editor and the twenty-four contributors to this study of problems facing Baptists today. The unusually full introduction traces the historical development of Baptists in America and shows that conflicts among them have punctuated their experience since they emerged as a distinct Protestant movement in the seventeenth century. The book has five divisions and editor Goodwin has supplied a helpful introduction to each of them. This feature enhances the coherence of the book, even though the authors have written about various topics from diverse points of view.

Part II, "The Search for Authority: Baptist Use and Interpretation of Scriptures," is the heart of the book because all the other controversies that have agitated Baptists reflect their attitudes toward this issue. Several contributors affirm that Baptists are people of the Bible, but their essays show substantial disagreement about the character and meaning of Scripture. Although historic Baptist confessions of faith uphold the trustworthiness and supreme authority of the Bible, those confessions have not deterred Baptists from adopting beliefs and practices contrary to them. Baptists in the Balance makes this obvious.

It appears that the editor and authors of these essays believe that broad diversity is not only a reality among Baptists but a sign of their enduring strength. Baptists began as Arminians but soon developed a potent Calvinistic branch that became the English progenitor of Baptist development in America. From its inception in the New World, the Baptist movement has been involved in so many divisions that it is almost impossible to define the term Baptist without fear of contradiction. How those divisions occurred and their relevance for current conditions in Baptist organizations is the substance of this book. Here are found examples of Baptist feminism, ecumenical inclusivism, and lamentations because conservative Southern Baptists have employed "superficial sloganizing about the inerrancy of the Scriptures.... in a political power struggle" (p. 223).

The one evident deficiency in this anthology of diversity is that no one speaks for the conservative, confessional point of view that the contributors reject either formally or by implication. All of them represent the moderate/liberal theological perspective. Even they put limits upon diversity.

James Edward McGoldrick

Cedarville College, Cedarville, OH

Copyright Evangelical Theological Society Sep 1999
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