Baptists and The False Dichotomy

I’m going to pick on Baptists because I was one and know all the ugly details first-hand. I was a party to some of the propaganda battles, much to my shame.

I noted in my series on The Cult that Satan is all too happy with folks pursuing any number of ostensibly good things, so long as none of them are the things God wants for us. He’s quite happy quoting Scripture himself when it can be used to promote something in his interest. You can be sure he understands revelation all too well.

During the 1970s I attended Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU), with the intent to go on to seminary and gain a professional education in the pastoral ministry. I note wryly that it was very easy in those days to obtain outright grants and the educational costs were considerably less. I didn’t get to seminary because God had other plans for me. Nonetheless, my pursuit of the undergraduate degree program was hardly a waste. My Father used the professors, both good and bad, to kindle a fire of passion for Him that still burns brightly.

While I was at college a very ugly debate swept across the Baptist landscape, among other evangelical denominations in the US. The most popular term for it was the debate over “Infallibility of the Bible.” The result was a fracturing of the Southern Baptist denomination, with whole segments splitting off, and an enduring divide in what remains. Today you’ll hear the terms “conservative and moderate” — the moderates rejected the liberal label, insisting that it already had a meaning that did not apply to them.

My favorite professor (Dr. Robert Clarke) from those days said the whole thing was baloney, completely missing the point. Even though his personal loyalties placed him in the moderate camp, he was actually rather outside the whole thing. But he was caught in a purge and forced to retire as the controversy continued into recent decades. I am forever grateful for the foundation of truth he helped to lay in my soul. How do I explain it? The principle of teaching from the heart as he did, not merely from the intellect, burned itself into my heart and resurfaced intellectually many years later. God used him in ways even the man himself did not realize, because he was too focused on the mission instead of himself. Despite Satan’s grand efforts, I am among perhaps only a few who escaped the prison of lies.

I’m going to just sketch out the background here to show how Satan has used The Cult to destroy faith, and then show how it manifested in Baptists. First, let’s recall that the business of “propositional truth” was a typical legalism of the Pharisees, and was a rallying cry of the so-called conservatives in that infallibility debate that blossomed in the 1970s. It goes all the way back to the Hellenizing of Hebrew religion. It’s difficult to explain in layman’s terms, but I’ll try.

God’s existence is rooted in the Spirit Realm. Such is the default for all existence, the ultimate reality, if you will. He created the universe more or less as a bubble of far lesser existence. Nobody can explain His motives, but He has offered some hints to just how small the whole thing is to Him. Our universe is little more to Him than a project on His divine workbench. Naturally, the essence of our universe reflects His divine character. It maintains a living dependence on Him; it wasn’t assembled, wound up and let go. Originally our existence inside this temporary bubble depended on that same living connection with Him and His nature within Creation. The Fall broke our connection, among other things. He offered redemption and restoration via a corrective revelation. That revelation calls us back to His character, but it demands a restoration of at least some portion of that living link between Spirit and Flesh.

The link between our existence in the Fallen Realm and His existence in the Spirit Realm is His divine moral character, a whole range of living perception through which we understand reality itself. I refer to that as the Moral Sphere, that boundary layer between the Two Realms. You cannot perceive the Moral Sphere without awakening the mind built into the very physical wiring of your heart. Our time here in this realm consists largely of returning our brains to proper subjection under the moral intelligence of the heart. The true nature of our existence is fully understood from the moral perspective, not from whatever our intellects can make of sensory and logical input.

This was all assumed in the Hebrew culture. What I describe in the previous paragraph is restoring something lost from the days of the Hebrew people. For the ancient Hebrews (and some neighboring cultures) this was simply the basic assumption that required very little direct comment. They did not imagine a world that flatly denied such things. Rather, they dealt with the problem of folks who preferred to ignore the demands of something everyone took for granted. This moral existence of redemption was hard work, and the flesh — both the lusts of fallen desire and the intellect in planning out satisfaction of those lusts — fought the whole way. But until they encountered Hellenism, there was no systematic denial of the Spirit Realm and the Moral Sphere. Hellenism flatly dismisses the whole thing and constructs a view of reality that presumes this universe is the Ultimate Reality and that man’s intellect is all we really need to handle things.

While the Pharisees didn’t accept the outright denial of the Spirit Realm, they did completely lose track of the linkage through the Moral Sphere. What’s left is just an airy-fairy fable offered as a dogmatic assertion without any possible realization in the soul. Christ restored the Moral Sphere in His teachings, but the Judaizers managed to hijack things. While truth continues to cut its own path in humans souls, the full awareness has ebbed and flowed in and out of private Christian teaching. Meanwhile, the Pharisees hijacked the visible organized institution of the churches. The Cult arose in this setting and made it a mission to keep the church locked into this compromise, and raised the sense of political necessity in stamping out that dangerous teaching of truth that God kept bringing back to life throughout history. Even when folks didn’t have a good way of talking about the truth of the Moral Sphere, they did find sufficient words to convey enough that genuine spiritual life never quite died out. So The Cult kept trying new ways of smothering it.

When Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas -> Thomism) made the link between Hellenism and Christian teaching mainstream, it brought the seeds of false dichotomy into the church structure. That is, the single best tool for fracturing the gospel message again and again was now right there at hand. For example, the Reformation used the same tools of logic inherent in Thomism. Calvinism and the controversy with Arminius arose from the same tools of logic. Quietism was a dangerous departure, but hijacked in itself later. And so on; you get the picture. The Cult always maintained agents in every rising movement of dissent. While specific successes varied, the net result is that Pharisaic legalism parading as reason never left Western Christian religion.

I’ll defer to someone else on the details of where Dispensationalism arose (I keep a copy of that page and all the images archived) but note that it was all kept on track by agents of The Cult. While the ostensible purpose was to build a counter to the notion that the Pope was Antichrist, the whole thing kept rolling in directions The Cult found even more useful. The Cult promoted the rise of Dispensational teaching, even sending Samuel Untermeyer to directly fund Cyrus Scofield’s “research” and then print the resulting annotated Bible text (Scofield Bible) that became the primary means of transmitting the grand heresy.

During and shortly after WW2, a bunch of Baptists of the middle-class social activist stripe were seduced into promoting this crazy teaching. They traveled the US and set up huge conferences where this garbage was taught. They published little newspapers like The Sword of the Lord, founded preacher academies and eventually colleges, etc. The teaching of divine grace had never been more legalistic. Part and parcel of all this was the dogmatic assertion that the Bible was infallible and “propositional truth.” Dispensationalism depends on first buying into verbal inspiration and the infallibility of the text.

The reason this became so active and controversial is because The Cult sponsored two opposing ideas. At the same time as this Dispensational doctrine was forming in England and the US, a large collection of teachings in German colleges and seminaries ran in the opposite direction. What was in the 1970s called “neo-orthodoxy” was a collection of ideas spawned by various attempts to reduce the Bible to the status of mere literature of its times. The Bible was not really from God, they said. They concocted all these documentary theories about how the Hebrew people pulled together layers of evolving religious ideas from their cultural mythology, editing the text of the Bible repeatedly. The whole purpose was to undermine trust in the Bible on rational grounds. Their teaching infected seminaries all over Western Christianity.

Indeed, the only way to have academic credibility in many circles was to adopt this neo-orthodoxy crap. When the rise of Dispensationalist infallibility teaching crashed into this moldy German rationalism, the fireworks were predictable. We had some pretty ugly scenes at OBU with bigshots hurling propaganda at each other publicly. It was nasty and personal and lives were ruined. At the time, I was somewhat swayed by my friends in the fundamentalist-conservative camp, and took some heat from the other side. That kind of thing served only to harden my resolve for a while, as you might expect. At the same time, some part of me knew the whole thing smelled like rotten fish. Eventually the Lord showed me the path out of that false dichotomy. Both sides were wrong because they shared an essential false assumption that denies the existence of the Moral Sphere.

The Hebrew people, including the Apostles themselves, were not hung up on the precise textual wording of Scripture. In the Hebrew culture, language was intended as road signs pointing the way to divine truth that could not be contained in mere words and human thoughts. For the Pharisees and those they influenced, Hellenism taught them that words were discrete containers of truth — “It says what it means and means what it says.” The Bible is the means to transmit divine revelation, but the words are not themselves the revelation. God speaks through the Bible to awaken hearts. Without the heart-led awareness, it’s just ink on paper. Without the Bible, you might still get to the truth, because God Himself says He has written His heart into Creation itself and that it is possible for humans to get that message. However, the Bible most certainly gives a context we dare not ignore if we can get our eyes on it. People with an active heart love the Bible and how it speaks far beyond the mere words.

The Baptist controversy smolders even today, and is a critical element in keeping them entangled in secular politics. I finally escaped the Baptist fantasy world a decade ago.