95 theses for the 21st century
For doors in Nashville and Atlanta
I
1. God is God.[1] Humans are notorious for making God into their own image or revising their image of God according to current sensibilities. God, however, is unaffected by our desires to make Him suit our preferences. God is infinite in nature, unlimited in power, astounding in wisdom, lives in eternal blessedness and bliss, and is beyond all human understanding. God will not bend to our desires to change His opinion on earthly matters.
2. Every human is created in the image of God, every last one.
3. The image of God is violated when human beings are used as objects to fulfill the desires of another person.
4. The image of God is violated by failure to protect the innocent from abusers. While it is wrong to suggest there is a vast number of clergy abusers in Baptist life, they are able to hide and practice abuse when the congregations and denominations will not take steps to stop them.
5. Church autonomy can be protected while protecting children at the same time.
6. Ordination must be able to be rescinded if a church is to police its clergy. Currently, a person in Baptist life can get ordained, violate the innocent, leave a trail of victims in his wake, and keep his ordination. There is simply no process to “un-ordain,” defrock, a Baptist minister.
7. One can believe it is important to protect survivors without being a radical feminist. It is not a distraction from the Great Commission to protect women and children in our congregation.
8. Humiliating survivors is unacceptable and is inconsistent with believing in the authority of the Bible.
9. Moving predators from church to church in order to protect them is an unacceptable violation of the image of God in their victims.
10. Protecting the reputation of abusers is unacceptable.
11. Treating women as-second class citizens (refusing to take seriously their reports of abuse, siding with their abusers, trying to “break down” survivors, publicly gawking at young women from the pulpit, name-calling and shaming survivors in private—all events that have occurred in the SBC) is unacceptable.
12. Believing your church, denomination, or “denomi-netork” is immune to a sexual abuse scandal is magical thinking.
13. There is no 1-to-1 correspondence between abuse and systems of theology.
14. Abuse has happened in conservative religious traditions, in liberal universities, in public schools, in the homes of atheistic movie producers, and among left-wing politicians. It is not tied to any ideology. No ideology makes it more or less likely to occur.
15. Failure to take necessary steps to prevent abuse invites abuse in the future.
16. Protecting the institution instead of the innocent is inconsistent with the Bible.
17. Unwillingness to protect the vulnerable from abuse will result harm to our institutions and will not be judged well by God.
18. No sermon on the urgency of evangelism delivered at the SBC annual meeting will mask naked power grabs or unwillingness to conduct a transparent investigation on abuse.
19. Saying the SBC has somehow become liberal or moderate, as some angry messengers at the last convention have done, is a denial of reality so fundamental it is almost diagnosable.
20. Watching some CFB’ers respond with glee to loss of Mohler makes me wonder if they have swerved off into hate.
21. Suggesting Albert Mohler and Ed Litton—men who are inerrantists, believe women should not be pastors, are anti-abortion, and anti-LGBTQ+ revolution are moderates—as some in the media and among the Conservative Baptist Network have done, is utterly bizarre.
22. Keeping the façade that the CBF is now a moderate leaning organization is a willful suspension of disbelief. It is now mainline progressive in orientation, energy, and its future.
II
23. Because of God’s nature, Humans have nothing analogous in experience to relate to God.
24. Therefore, we humans do not have the ability to understand God without revelation.
25. Therefore, any theology working from experience backward to God fails. Fortunately, God has revealed Himself in the Law, in the voice of the Prophets, in the Scriptures, and fully and finally in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the exact imprint of God’s very being.
26. Contrary to the contemporary theological consensus, God does not experience emotions in the way humans do.
27. God does not need to feel empathy to love. God is love.
28. God does not need to be moved with compassion to do what is right. God does what is right because of His nature.
29. God is good. The good is an outgrowth of who God is.
30. God is beyond emotions. God is not diminished by not needing them.
31. Despite modern objections and as is difficult as it is to fathom, universalism is not supported by the Biblical text and has been consistently rejected by the Christian tradition.
32. God is all-powerful. Arguing for limits on God’s power based on the experience of suffering in the world is to misunderstand the nature of God, the nature of our experience, the nature of the fall, the nature of judgment, the nature of God’s goals in our lives, and the nature of the life to come.
33. The Doctrine of the Trinity does not allow for hierarchy in the Godhead.
34. The Godhead is not a model for how humans can conduct themselves.
35. The Trinity is not a social program.
36. There is no human analogy to the Trinity. All of them fail and tend toward heresy.
III
37. Arguing God created evil to bring out good in humans is to misunderstand the goodness of God. Because God is good and God is goodness itself, God creating evil is incoherent.
38. Arguing evil is necessary in the same way night is necessary is to misunderstand the nature of evil and press a prominent analogy about the nature of evil too far.
39. Arguing God is incapable of stopping evil is a profound misreading of the Biblical text and renders Christian hope feckless.
40. Arguing evil has power to make us better because we may learn from evil experiences is to misunderstand the corrosive nature of evil and to misunderstand the power of God. It is God that draws good out of evil. Evil cannot produce good nor can we cannot produce good out of evil outside God’s power.
41. Conflating evil and suffering leads to misunderstanding both.
42. Suffering is downstream of evil, not necessarily evil itself.
43. Outside divine revelation, humans are hard pressed to define evil, tending to conflate evil with something we would not prefer and that which causes us pain. It is very easy to discuss evil things, it is very hard—impossible—for us to define evil itself outside revelation.
44. Contra Calvin, there is a distinction between what God causes and what God allows. In other words, there is no tidy connection between an occurrence in the world and what God wills. We cannot see an event and conclude that because it occurred God must have wanted it to occur without lapsing into superstition or forgetting the New Testament’s frequent discussions of principalities and powers.
45. There is no necessary one-to-one correspondence between an evil action and suffering a particular event. Just because I have done a bad thing does not necessarily mean that something I suffer is the direct result.
46. We should not, though, argue God never corrects the believer.
IV
47. Because God is God and only revelation can teach us what God expects of us, using God as the patron saint of our petty political causes is almost idolatrous.
48. God has not revealed to us a preferred political system. Using the political system from ancient Israel to argue for current public policy is anachronistic, at best.
49. One must not read the term ‘justice’ in the Old Testament as a one-to-one replacement for ‘social justice’ in common vernacular.
50. Evil is implicit in every political system because every political system is created by humans.
51. Liberation theology is baptized Marxism.
52. One can believe it is necessary to care for the poor and oppressed without arguing for a socialist society.
53. More progress toward eliminating global poverty has been made in the last 50 years than ever before in human history.
54. Strains within progressive theology change the traditional Christian emphasis on redemption and replaces it with an emphasis on political “liberation.” The liberation is only so-called, because it becomes an enslavement to the secular state. This repurposing of Christianity and the Church for political ends, no matter how well intended, is effectively creating different faith than the one handed to the Church by the Apostles.
55. Conservative political theology can often conflate the Kingdom of God with liberal democratic capitalism.
56. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual reality not a socio-political reality contra Buttrick.
57. The Church is not the Kingdom of God but serves as an invitational force into the Kingdom of God.
58. Any alignment of the Church and the state is a detriment to both.
59 . If it turns out God would vote the way you do, you have probably made God in your own image.
V
60. To reject God’s teaching on sexuality as revealed in the Bible is to reject of the authority of the Bible. One cannot hold the Bible is the “Final authority for faith and practice,” and reject the Scripture’s clear and consistent teachings on sexuality, interpretative games notwithstanding.
61. To have LGBTQ+ clergy openly living with a partner prior to marriage with the congregation’s blessing not only reject’s Paul’s teaching on homosexuality but the entire sexual ethic of the New Testament.
62. To have openly gay and openly transgender ministers greeted with silence, celebration, and tacit approval from their denomi-network is tantamount to endorsement of gay clergy.
63. To have a known sex offender on staff is tantamount to an acceptance of child sexual abuse.
64. To paraphrase Augustine, if you believe what you like in the Scriptures and reject what you do not like, it is not the Scriptures you believe but yourself.
65. If one is able to reject Biblical teachings on sexuality, then every other Christian ethical teaching can be undone by the same method.
66. Human sexual expression is a gift of God and is not to be denigrated by the Church.
Human sexual expression is designed to exist in the context of the lifelong commitment of marriage.
67. While the Bible records many exceptions, the expectation from the beginning was marriage was to be a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman.
VI
68. Since all are created in the image of God, racism is anathema to the Christian faith.
69. One cannot hold to the authority of Scripture and practice “gutter level racism,” or tolerate it in leadership bodies, or refuse hold those who practice it to account.
70. Racism was the common practice of humans before the birth of Christianity, Christianity was the first motivator to seeing every person as equal.
71. One important implication of the Christian faith is the reconciliation of all people. No longer do racial characteristics define humans. Rather, we are defined by our relationship to God and to each other. God is the originator of ending racism.
72. One does not have to believe in Critical Race Theory (CRT) to hold that racism is a real, malignant, evil.
73. CRT is simply Marxism in another guise. It replaces “haves and have nots” with “oppressor and oppressed.” To be white is to be, by definition, the oppressor. To be a person of color is to be, by definition, the oppressed.
74. CRT devotees believe it is always necessary to side with the oppressed. This is true even
when the oppressed are clearly doing evil, or are threatening genocide.
75. Individual racism cannot be cured outside a transformation of the heart.
76. Structural racism cannot be cured by dismantling the police force.
77. One must be careful when using “lived experience” that he or she is not using anecdotal evidence.
VII
78. We Baptists are significantly outside the mainstream of Christian thought on the nature of the Lord’s Supper and of Baptism. It sounds as if we draw our speech about the ordinances from Zwingli. One would be hard pressed to find anything like the way Baptists talk about the ordinances early Christian thought.
79. Our current method of ordaining pastors is fraught with peril.
80. Baptist Seminaries (The six SBC seminaries and the CBF supported seminaries and divinity schools) are becoming increasingly Calvinist on the one hand and increasingly progressive on the other.
81. Theological training is too long, too expensive, and too ineffective.
82. The search process for getting ministers to congregations is frustrating for all involved.
83. It would be a very positive event if the church spoke more forcefully about mental health issues.
VIII
84. Twitter is not reality.
85. Facebook is not reality.
86. Virtual church is great, but it is no replacement for worship in real life.
IX
87. The war between science and faith is overblown and only serves the interests of those keeping of the façade.
88. Science is a way of understanding the world.
89. Faith is the way to know God.
90. Science cannot answer the questions of the meaning, purpose and goal of life. These questions are outside its scope.
91. One can believe in the power of science while having a strong theology of creation.
92. One can believe in miracles and scientific discovery.
93. Science is a wonderful gift, but it is imperfect.
94. Using God as an explanation for when science reaches its limits trivializes God and ignores God’s transcendence.
95. Faith has nothing to fear from honest inquiry.
[1] Hat tip Karl Barth
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