Southern Baptists Are Both Missional and Confessional: A Response to Rick Warren

In the Baptist church, some phrases live forever. On any given Sunday, you’ll hear a pious deacon praying for a “hedge of protection” around someone in need. Or an evangelistic preacher prompting the congregation with the words, “Every head bowed and every eye closed.” In some churches, you may hear another time-worn Baptist expression: “There’s no creed but the Bible.” Unlike the other time-honored idioms, this expression is a myth. In fact, “No creed but the Bible” is a creed.

Baptists today should be quick to point out the irony of Bible-only-ism, but in some quarters, the opposite has been the case. The myth of Baptist anticreedalism has recently been resuscitated by Rick Warren, who implores fellow Southern Baptists to “return to the original Baptist Vision of unity through a mission, not a confession.” According to Warren, “That would heal the SBC.”

Unfortunately, Warren’s vision is revisionist. Through most of Baptist history, Baptists’ confessionalism hasn’t been pitted against our missional work of evangelism, church planting, and sending missionaries. Traditionally, among Baptists, the question hasn’t been if a church affirms a creed but which creed they affirm.

People of Conscience and Confessions

For half a millennium, Baptists have had confessions. From the London Confessions of the 17th century to the Philadelphia Confession of the 18th to the New Hampshire Confession of the 19th to the Baptist Faith and Message in the 20th (and 21st), Baptists have always been a confessing people, and they weren’t the only ones confessing their faith.

Baptists today should be quick to point out the irony of Bible-only-ism, but the myth has recently been resuscitated by Rick Warren.

In 1644, English Particular Baptists were eager to show they weren’t hostile to the national church, but they claimed, “We cannot do anything contrary to our understanding and consciences.” After the Act of Toleration (1689), English Baptists wished to demonstrate continuity with the other Reformed brethren in England, and they used the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) as a basic framework for their Second London Confession (1689), with a few modifications.

Distinct from their Anglican and Presbyterian brethren, English Baptists were marked by a dual emphasis on liberty of conscience and the obligation to preach the gospel to all nations. Just before chapter 21, “Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience,” the 1689 confession features an entirely new chapter, not in the WCF, titled “Of the Gospel and the Extent Thereof.” Article 3 articulates, “In all ages, the preaching of the gospel has been granted unto persons and nations, as to the extent or straitening of it, in great variety, according to the counsel of the will of God.” From this addition, it’s clear these two ideas—liberty of conscience and the duty of evangelism—grew together in Baptist confessional life.

The Philadelphia Confession (1742), the first generally used Baptist confession in colonial America, was largely based on the Second London Confession. But in New England, where Baptist persecution was worst and state-sponsored confessions were most coercive, an emphasis on the conscience increased. As a result, Baptist confessions weren’t generally adopted in the land of the Puritans to the extent they were in the Middle Colonies, Virginia, and North Carolina.

After the First Great Awakening, the so-called Separate Baptist movement emerged from Congregationalism. This movement quickly juxtaposed and contrasted authentic, biblical religion with lifeless confessionalism and the moribund spirituality of the state-sponsored church. During this time, the missional work of the Separates proliferated. One Separate Baptist from Connecticut, Shubal Stearns, planted one of the most prolific churches in Baptist history, Sandy Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina. As a result, Sandy Creek (and the stream of churches that followed it) wasn’t as rigorously confessional as other Baptist traditions.

Does this stream’s missional growth give some historic weight to Warren’s claim that Baptists would be better off without a common confession? No, even the Sandy Creek Association adopted Principles of Faith in 1816 and, for the sake of unity in mission, eventually adopted the 1833 New Hampshire Confession in 1845.

Confessional Origins of the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) grew from these deep Baptist roots of confession and conscience. Oliver Hart, the third pastor of the Southern Baptist “mother church” First Baptist Charleston, was the chief architect of the Charleston Association, the first such association of Baptist churches in the South. Hart was a product of evangelism, having sat as a boy under the preaching of arch-evangelist George Whitefield.

Though a Regular Baptist (from the Philadelphia Association, and with roots in England), he ordained Separate Baptists (with roots in New England). Hart also produced the Charleston Confession (1767), a document drawn from the Philadelphia Confession that later formed the basis for Southern Seminary’s Abstract of Principles (1858).

These two ideas—liberty of conscience and the duty of evangelism—grew together in Baptist confessional life.

Hart’s successor at First Baptist Charleston was Richard Furman, one of the most confessional Baptists in the antebellum period and founder of the South Carolina Baptist convention. Furman used Benjamin Keach’s Baptist Catechism to quiz the children at his church on the doctrine the church confessed, but he also thought “that it accorded better with Christian wisdom to adopt an unmutilated Revelation, than to press it by forced constructions into the service of a system.” Though suspicious of theological “systems,” it’s clear that Furman was confessional and missional. And these twin emphases influenced the Triennial Convention (America’s original Baptist missionary convention where Furman served as the first president) as well as the later SBC.

In 1845, William B. Johnson, who became the inaugural president of the SBC, boasted in the “Baptist aversion for all creeds but the Bible,” suggesting he opposed creeds, but Johnson was also complex. Though he rejected creedal authority, he supported institutions and men who promoted confessions in Baptist life.

When welcomed to the floor as the fourth president of the Triennial Convention, Johnson paid homage to his predecessor and boyhood hero, “the sainted Furman,” and his appeal for forming the new Southern Baptist Convention sounded somewhat confessional. Though the newly formed SBC “constructed for [their] basis no new creed,” Johnson nevertheless appealed to some form of common “Bible ground” to which all Baptists in the denomination should be committed. Perhaps unwittingly, Johnson believed in doctrinal boundaries.

Confessing People

In his plea for Baptists to be missional as opposed to confessional, Rick Warren has argued, “For 80 years, the SBC grew without ANY confession.” The convention’s founding without a “new creed” and its first president W. B. Johnson’s anticreedal sentiments provide some fodder for this perspective, but Warren’s statement is misleading. It misrepresents the way confessions and freedom of conscience have operated in Baptist life in America.

Baptist churches, which believe in congregational authority and “democratic religion,” refuse to force other Baptist churches to adopt a particular set of doctrines. But when cooperating for the sake of mission, they’ve long been a confessing people.

As far north as New England and south as Florida, Southern Baptist churches in the mid-to-late 19th century adopted the New Hampshire Confession because it accommodated strict Calvinists and non-Calvinists alike. When Southwestern Seminary was founded in 1908, it also adopted the New Hampshire Confession as its articles of faith. Other churches aligned more closely with the Second London Confession. For example, when the Florida Association petitioned for admission to the Georgia Baptist Convention in 1846 following the original SBC, there was a “protracted debate” over Flordia’s use of the New Hampshire Confession.

Tennessee Baptist R. B. C. Howell, the second president of the SBC, supported the use of confessions and became one of the leading opponents of antimission Baptists in American history. South Carolina Baptist James P. Boyce, the first president of Southern Seminary, became one of the most confessional Baptists in Southern Baptist history. In his Abstract of Systematic Theology, Boyce even referred to the Westminster Confession as “our confession.” Over time, Southern Baptists didn’t get less confessional; they got more confessional. Nevertheless, Boyce continually emphasized the Scriptures as the higher authority. His counterpart at Southern Seminary, Basil Manly Jr. (who authored Southern’s Abstract of Principles), was known for doing the same.

The Baptists’ emphasis upon the priority of the Bible along with their consistent use of creeds supports historian Greg Wills’s claim that Baptists today

have been misled by attending only to what Baptists said—and only to part of what they said—rather than to what they did. In their pleas for liberty of conscience and congregationalism, Baptists berated other denominations as creedal and called for “no creed but the Word of God,” but they encountered creeds every time they entered their churches and association meetings.

Creeds were vital for doctrinal and missional unity because they provided the agreement and standards necessary for Baptists to walk together in fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Creeds were vital for doctrinal and missional unity because they provided the agreement and standards necessary for Baptists to walk together in fulfillment of the Great Commission

The introduction to the original Baptist Faith and Message (BFM 1925) states that “any group of Baptists, large or small, have the inherent right to draw up for themselves and publish to the world a confession of their faith whenever they think it advisable to do so.”

Baptist churches are free to make confessions. They’re also free from having their consciences violated by a confession. Therefore, instead of attempting to alter the long-standing confessions of others, Baptists always have the right to withdraw cooperation and make their own confessions. As a Baptist, Rick Warren is encouraged to exercise this freedom.

Though the SBC didn’t adopt its confession until 1925, this in no way means Southern Baptists were without confessions or were anticonfessional. In fact, the SBC used the New Hampshire Confession as the basis for the BFM because so many Baptist churches had already adopted it. When it was producing the original BFM, the American Baptist Theological Seminary—founded in 1924 as an interracial, cooperative endeavor between the SBC and the black National Baptist Convention (NBC)—drew up a confession modeled largely on the Articles of Religious Belief of the Baptist Bible Institute of New Orleans (later New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary).

The SBC’s dual emphasis on confessions and liberty of conscience unites the Convention to its English Baptist roots. Contrary to what some may think (or tweet), Southern Baptists have never been an anticreedal people. We find our unity in both doctrine and mission. Can Southern Baptists be both missional and confessional? Yes, we’ve always been.