Shared sacrifice (not layoffs) is working at NOBTS

No hint of inquisition. No layoffs. Shared sacrifice was the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), model response to the recession announced in January.

Bruce Nolan of The New Orleans Times-Picayune described it this week:

. . . nearly across-the-board 5 percent pay cuts for some 250 faculty and staff. Beyond that, other austerity measures: a hiring freeze, energy conservation and rigorous cost-cutting. Increases in teaching loads and, for the families of student workers, loss of medical benefits. . . . President Chuck Kelley . . . 10 percent . . . Key administrators would take a 7 percent cut.

Returning to NOBTS six weeks after that austerity was imposed, he found “the seminary seems to have absorbed the news with a mixture of determination, grim acceptance and relief that the administration chose not to cut jobs.”

Specifically:

“I think, to a person, people are saying that a 5 percent pay cut is better than a layoff. I don’t think I have any colleagues who are thinking, ‘We could do without those two (people). I’d put a noose around their necks if I could have my 5 percent back,’ ” said Bob Stewart, an associate professor of philosophy and theology.

This binding together of the ethics of Christian compassion and business practice is the way to go, some say. Something NOBTS staff affirmed this week. Lloyd Harsch, an associate professor of church history, told Nolan:

We feel like we’re in this together. Whether you’re cleaning the carpets or the president, we’re in this together.

Thus far, shared (necessary) sacrifice for a shared mission = a stronger team.

Burleson’s proof of inquisition

His accuracy questioned, pastor/blogger Wade Burleson published a transcript today demonstrating that the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) inquisition against which he warned, was indeed at hand.

A refined taste for Protestant theology is required to see how, in the course of a tape-recorded interview, SWBTS chancellor Paige Patterson confessed that he did indeed wish to winnow all of the Calvinist professors out of his staff.

To the untutored ear, the key statement sounds like a Christian divinity school throwaway line:

Southwestern will not build a school in the future around anybody who could not look anybody in the world in the eyes and say, “Christ died for your sins.”

Patterson is conversing with theological illuminate. however, and they know the targeted Calvinists would not say that.

Calvinists believe (oversimplifying) some sinners are damned by their failure to repent. Thus Christ did not die for them. As you can see. For his death did not save them.

So a Calvinist would say, as Burleson explains:

Christ died for sinners. Do you know yourself to be a sinner and in need of a Savior? If so, Christ died for you.

Tulips for the next generation of Southern Baptists

That distinction is made by the tulip Calvinists whom Burleson is defending as part of his larger defense of doctrinal diversity among Southern Baptists.

Amid his demonstration that he was both honest and factually correct in his warnings of a looming (perhaps now abandoned) anti-Calvinist inquisition at SEBTS, Burleson does make his larger intention clear:

. . . It is the essence of five-point Calvinism, and these are the people Patterson wishes to purge from Southwestern. If Southern Baptists cannot see that the purging in the Southern Baptist Convention continues, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with a particular ecclesiological, soteriological, pneumatological and eschatological ideology of those currently in charge and their vocal sychophants, then we are in a very dangerous place as a cooperating convention of autonomous churches.

Burleson is then resisting SBC’s destructive consolidation into a narrow group of what former Biblical Recorder Editor Tony Cartledge has called Batholics and Cathists.

That grinding consolidation, and fallout from the running battle of conservative takeover. are already doing the denomination harm.

Diversity is winning hearts and minds, and in addition, Burleson’s opponents are finding it difficult to persist with the argument that further harm is just fine, thank you.

Tulips get a reprieve at SWBTS: Inquisition delayed

Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson stood his ground today regarding the planned purge of Calvinist professors from the ranks at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The former Southern Baptist International Mission Board member also provided more detail and made it clear that he isn’t just fighting for Calvinists — he’s fighting for fair treatment in Baptist life and healthy diversity in Baptist faith culture.

Tulips for the next generation of Southern Baptists

He reported a victory this week for fair treatment and diversity:

There will be faculty reductions at SWBTS as there will be at Southern and other educational institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention. But, due to the uproar over the exposure of removing only the Calvinists at SWBTS, the chosen method of reduction, at least as of today, will be different.

One march is not the war. He admonishes:

Southern Baptists better realize the path being taken by some leaders, and by God’s grace, we better do all within our power to stop the forced removal of those people from SBC service and employment who don’t agree with particular ecclesiological, soteriological and eschatological idealogues leading our Convention. This week was a solid step in the right direction. And, as the picture above shows, saving the tulips at SWBTS is on behalf of the next generation of Southern Baptists.

Whether or not you’re a Southern Baptist, we recommend the entire piece to you here.

Part one of the debate, with its stream of sometimes harshly accusatory comments attached, is here.

Inquisition at a Southern Baptist Seminary?

Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson says today that Dr. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, is using the economic implosion to dump Calvinist professors. Who will hit the street, and how soon, is not made clear.

John Calvin

Burleson, an outspoken former member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, does report there was a staff gathering yesterday at which some whose heads are on the block were cross-examined, albeit not quite stretched on the rack.

The details of today’s brief Burleson blog may be hotly debated. One commenter already says there was no such professorial gathering at SWBTS. Yet there is no denying that Anti-Calvinism has been on the march in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Someone should note that the Batholics and Cathists are merely continuing to destructively exercise the institutional power which came to their hands with the conservative takeover of the SBC as the result of a running battle from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The losing moderates predicted that conservatives would soon begin driving out the somehow insufficiently fundamentalist.

Burleson has, in this most recent blog and elsewhere, resisted that narrowing. He argues that doctrinal diversity is indispensable to a healthy SBC. He argues that a spirit which “demands doctrinal conformity,” like the demands he says are being made at SWBTS, is destructive to the entire denomination.

Calvin jubilee

John Calvin

Presbyterians, celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, offer two curricula for reading his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 2009:

• One online from Princeton Theological Seminary.
• Another downloadable [.pdf] from the Foundation For Reformed Theology.

Oh, yes, in English (not the 1559 Latin or 1560 French).

Princenton jumps right in on Jan. 5 with “The Appeal To Custom Against Truth:”

Even in their appeal to “custom” they accomplish nothing. To constrain us to yield to custom would be to treat us most unjustly. Indeed, if men’s judgments were right, custom should have been sought of good men. But it often happens far otherwise: what is seen being done by the many soon obtains the force of custom; while the affairs of men have scarcely ever been so well regulated that the better things pleased the majority. Therefore, the private vices of the many have often caused public error, or rather a general agreement on vices, which these good men now want to make law. Those with eyes can perceive it is not one sea of evils that has flooded the earth, but many dangerous plagues have invaded it, and everything is rushing headlong. Hence, one must either completely despair of human affairs or grapple with these great evils-or rather, forcibly quell them. And this remedy is rejected for no other reason save that we have long been accustomed to such evils. But, granting public error a place in the society of men, still in the Kingdom of God his eternal truth must alone be listened to and observed, a truth that cannot be dictated to by length of time, by long-standing custom, or by the conspiracy of men. In such manner Isaiah of old instructed God’s elect not to “call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy,” “not” to “fear what they fear, nor be in dread” thereof, but rather to “hallow the Lord of Hosts and let him be their fear and dread” [Isa. 8:12-13].

Enjoy.

Calvinism: The latest Southern Baptist reason to fight

John Calvin

Southern Baptists, well known for their infighting, are going at it tooth and claw over Calvinism.

Calvinism is also called Reformed Theology. Calvinists believe that some of are elected by God to be saved, and others are not.

Those who aren’t Calvinists say this view reduces the drive for evangelism, which is a traditional Southern Baptist emphasis. Whereas Calvinists say evangelism is important, although it is God who saves people, not the efforts of evangelists.

Calvinism has been growing in influence within the SBC.

The president of the flagship seminary is a Calvinist and a 2007 survey reported that 30 percent of recent seminary graduates were Calvinists, while only 10 percent of then-practicing pastors held Calvinist views.

In 2006, two high-profile Southern Baptists met for what was first thought to be a debate, which matured into a dialogue about Calvinism within the Southern Baptist Convention.

One debater was Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and a Calvinist.

The other debater was Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, who is not a Calvinist. Baptist Press, which is controlled by the Southern Baptist Convention, reported on the meeting, as did the independent Associated Baptist Press news service.

At the time, the two seminary presidents said they hoped they could be an example of how to discuss differences and remain friends.

Two years later, the discussion is getting less and less friendly.

The Founders Ministries, a group of Calvinists who maintain that the founders of the SBC were Calvinists, lists three recent examples of conflicts that are dividing the Southern Baptist Convention.

Wade Burleson, a Calvinist and a prominent blogger, cites those Founders Ministries examples when he warns that a line has been drawn in the sand and Calvinists are being targeted.

That line in the sand harkens back to a battle for control of the SBC waged from the late 1970s through much of the 1990s. The winners were those who called themselves conservatives, but who are known as fundamentalists by their adversaries. They defeated those who call themselves moderates, but who are called liberals by the conservatives.

When it became clear that conservatives were going to win, moderates predicted that conservatives would soon begin fighting among themselves, because of the nature of fundamentalism.

The battle over Calvinism means that prediction may be coming true.