Okay, from TIME Magazine.
“…in a now famous meeting at New Orleans’ Cafe du Monde, two scandalized conservatives, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, hatched an insurgency. Packing the annual convention of 1979, they elected a conservative president and unearthed bylaws that amplified his power. “Baptist battles” consumed each convention until 1990, when the right wing prevailed decisively. The SBC then allied itself with the Republican Party, insisted on word-for-word biblical inerrancy and produced a drumbeat of provocative pronouncements on topics like wifely submission and the need to convert Jews.”
The latest policies,support for the death penalty and an explicit ban on women pastors is really the tip of the iceberg.
The SBC deleted a sentence in the denomination’s guiding document stating that “the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ,” replacing it with language suggesting that Scripture, as God’s direct revelation, must be regarded as the ultimate authority.
Here’s the deal: when the Bible is interpreted through Christ, a believer is granted a certain latitude, because in Protestantism each Christian’s experience of the Savior is incontestably his or her own, unmediated by priest or minister. This new language seems to represent not just a confining literalism but a ceding of personal power to the denomination’s scriptural experts.
The upstart of this whole affair is a group calling themselves the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship who is also meeting in Orlando. This group has set up seperate missions, seminaries and publishing houses.
Right now they have 1,800 affiliated churches.
There may be history happening here!
I should be noted that churches which are members of the SBC are not required to follow its “edicts” in any way, shape or form.
Also:
I’m not sure why the phrase “who is also meeting in Orlando” warrants italics, but the CBF is more than just some “group”, as you put it. The goal of the CBF is to offer churches and alternative to the political whore that is the SBC. As far as seperate seminaries go, I’m not too sure about that one. There would be no reason for this, since the CBF is not trying to create a new denomination, but rather, trying to overhaul an existing one which has lost its focus and strayed from its original mission. The CBF is not trying to replace the SBC as the governing body of the Southern Baptist denomination. Southern Baptism, by definition, has no definative governing body. The best way to describe what the SBC was and should be, and what the CBF is, is a unifying body. The word of the SBC and CBF is not law, and never will be. That’s just not the way Southern Baptism works.