Pluses and Minuses

From Morris Chapman's address to the 2009 Southern Baptist Convention yesterday:

The Southern Baptist Convention is experiencing a resurgence in the belief that divine sovereignty alone is at work in salvation without a faith response on the part of man.

Some are given to explain away the “whosoever will” of John 3:16. How can a Christian come to such a place when Ephesians says, “For by grace are you saved through faith” (Eph. 2:8)? I do not rise to become argumentative, or to change minds already convinced of one perspective or the other. But I do rise to state the obvious. Man is often tempted to design a theological theory in light of a biblical antinomy in order to clarify what God is trying to say.

I do not know a single Southern Baptist who believes that divine sovereignty alone is at work in salvation without a faith response. I do not know a single Calvinist that believes this either! I could be wrong. There may be a Calvinist or Southern Baptist preacher out there that believes in Hyper-Calvinism, but I assure you that he preaches to a congregation of 20 people out in the middle of the woods. You can find plastered all over the Bible that NO ONE is saved apart from a faith response to the gospel. But you know what you can't find in the Bible? The phrase "whosoever will" in the verse John 3:16.

Here's a shot at Acts 29 from Chapman in the same speech:

Some of the church-growth methodologies that masquerade under the guise of Bible exposition are increasingly known for the crude themes and the vulgar language of their strongest advocates. The sacred desk is no place for the carnal, the sensual, and the sensational. Ministers of the Gospel must exercise great caution when rushing in where angels dare not tread, and churches and pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention must avoid even the appearance of evil in this regard.

I love how he calls missional living and church planting a "church growth strategy". Living with a Christ-exalting sense of purpose and planting Christ-centered Bible believing Spirit led churches is not a church growth strategy. It's the church growth strategy -you know, the one found in the New Testament and the one that has produced authentic Christianity throughout church history. The guys at Baptist 21 actually apologized because of Morris' address. I am tempted to be much more sarcastic and move into some of the ridiculous motions, but in the spirit of charity, I'll move on to the positives.

The Great Commission Resurgence passed! Praise God that Southern Baptists are drawing together on this point. Johnny Hunt, Al Mohler, Danny Akin, and Chuck Kelly all gave wonderful addresses. I was encouraged greatly by their words and spirit. NOBTS is extraordinarily blessed by God to have Chuck Kelly, a man who wears joy in God on his sleeve, as its president. If there is anything positive about NOBTS, it is that we are under Dr. Kelly's leadership.

There's another positive that I want to talk about, but iMonk said it better than I ever could, so I will leave it for him to say:

The younger leaders of the SBC are taking on power in a denomination that has been, for the most part, attempting to lock the doors and hope they would go away. Well, they didn’t. They came to the convention and voted in a mechanism to take an urgent look at what we are doing for the one thing that holds us together: a commitment to carry out the Great Commission. What you saw today was a serious changing of the power grid in the SBC. The vast numbers of obedient old-guard messengers are never again going to show up and make the SBC into a wholly owned subsidiary of the culture war or the Jerry Vines version of the SBC. This is now a denomination that has given itself clear and simple instructions: Get to the task of world missions, not the task of building a denominational culture.