A man named Paul Pressler warned us that a mistaken view of authority would result in debauchery and downgrade. He was right. What he didn’t tell us was that his vision for American Christianity can be one in every of the ways we’d get there.
News didn’t break concerning the death of the retired Houston judge, the co-architect of the “Baptist Reformation” that we called “the conservative resurgence,” until days after his demise, probably attributable to the incontrovertible fact that he died in disgrace.
My colleague Daniel Silliman explains excellently the paradox of Pressler’s private and non-private life. According to multiple serious and credible allegations by named people, with corroboration from multiple others and over a really long time period, Pressler was a sexual molester of young men and boys. As reporter Rob Downen of The Texas Tribune summarizes in his thread, the character of the corroborating evidence against the late judge is the scale of a mountain.
It’s fair to say that almost all people—definitely most individuals in Southern Baptist pews—didn’t find out about these reports of such a villainous nature for a very long time. But additionally it is fair to say that nearly everyone, not less than those even minimally close up, could see other elements—a cruelty, a viciousness, a vindictiveness—that displayed the technique of Machiavelli, not the ways of the Messiah. His defining virtue—for all of us who retold the “Won Cause” mythology of the reformers who “saved the convention from liberalism”—was not Christlikeness however the incontrovertible fact that he was willing to fight.
And fight he did. At a gathering of pastors, he famously used the metaphor that conservatives would must “go for the jugular” in defeating the moderate Baptist leaders of the time. Commentator Bill Moyers and I might have sharply divergent views on almost every major theological issue, but he accurately described Pressler, within the Nineteen Eighties, as one who “rules the Southern Baptist Convention like a swaggering Caesar, breaking good men when it pleases him.” Good men, and ladies, indeed were broken—and a few are breaking still.
I write this as a biblical inerrantist—more convinced than ever that the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God and that it incorporates, as an oft-repeated line of our confession of religion puts it, “truth, with none mixture of error, for its matter.” There were real problems with what any honest observer would call theological liberalism in some places, especially in some sectors of the Southern Baptist academy. But, as I got here to understand much later than I must have, a few of those deemed to be “liberals” weren’t so in any respect. Riffing on a misattributed quote from Andy Warhol, I’d realize that amongst Baptists, everyone gets a turn at being called a liberal for not less than quarter-hour.
And many others, I’ve come to see, liberalized precisely because they saw the mafia-like tactics of those reminiscent of Pressler and concluded that, since this “conservatism” was so obviously not of the spirit of Christ, whatever was its mirror image have to be right. I don’t agree, as a Christian, that that is the proper response—but, as a human being, I can understand it.
Sometimes, when teaching theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, I might quote Pressler warning about what he called the “Dalmatian theory of inspiration.”
“Once you say that the Bible could contain error, you make yourself the judge of what portions of the Bible are true and which portions are error,” Pressler said in an interview at the peak of the Southern Baptist controversy over biblical inerrancy. “It is a presumptuous thing for a person to edit God. Somebody has called it the spot theory of inspiration. The Bible was inspired in spots, and we’re inspired to identify the spots.”
Even before the court actions and subsequent revelations, though, those of us within the conservative wing of Baptist life must have recognized the low view of biblical authority even within the actions Pressler did in full public view. Instead, we were told, and believed, that the stakes were too high—the orthodoxy of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination—to fret that the warlords leading the charge weren’t like Jesus. Many of us learned to tolerate the concept that one can do evil that good may result—a contradiction of the inerrant Word of God (Rom. 3:8).
The implicit idea is that, if the stakes are high enough, the same old norms of Christian morality—on truth-telling and kindness, gentleness, love, joy, self-control, etc.—may be ignored, not less than long enough to repair the issue and return to normal.
This will not be an unusual temptation: Let’s violate human rights so as to save human rights. Let’s terminate the Constitution to avoid wasting the Constitution. Let’s elect sexual abusers to guard the family. Let’s disobey the Bible to avoid wasting the Bible. Pressler warned (about other people in other situations) that what’s tolerated is ultimately celebrated. That’s not all the time true, in fact, however it definitely was within the case of conviction defined as quarrelsomeness.
Before one knows it, one finally ends up with a partisan definition of truth, all of the more ironic for defenders of biblical inerrancy and—with a situational definition of ethics—for warriors against moral relativism. When this happens, the criterion by which the confession of religion is interpreted is thru whatever controversy enlivens the group. Biblical passages that appear to be violated by one’s “enemies” are then emphasized, while those applying to 1’s own “side” are minimized. To do that well, one needs some authoritative, if not authoritarian, leaders to identify the spots which can be to be underlined and to skip over those to be ignored.
What difference does it make if one’s liberalism is characterised by ignoring Paul but quoting the Sermon on the Mount, or by ignoring the Sermon on the Mount but quoting Paul? How is one a liberal who explains away the Exodus but takes literally the Prophets, while that’s not true for the one who explains away the Prophets but takes literally the Exodus?
If the Bible is breathed out by God, then all of it is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout). A high view of biblical authority doesn’t, by itself, guarantee orthodoxy.
As one in every of my (very conservative) professors in seminary once told me, “Biblical inerrancy, by itself, is just an agreed-upon table of contents.” The work of interpretation have to be done, and that requires the labor of determining what matters are of “first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3) and what matters may be debated without ending cooperation. True enough.
But one can’t even debate those problems with interpretation in good faith if all sides are operating with their very own secret canons-within-the-canon, determined by what to affirm or deny so as to stay within the tribe. That’s what the Bible calls being “tossed from side to side by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14). Whether those winds blow to the left or to the precise or to the middle, they leave us adrift.
Paul Pressler said he believed in biblical authority. He said that it mattered. It did, and it does. But the last 40 years should teach us that inerrancy will not be enough. It doesn’t matter how loudly one sings the words, “the Bible tells me so,” if one’s life and character contradict the words, “Jesus loves me, this I do know.” Conviction without character destroys lives, and, within the long-term, reveals itself to have been something aside from conviction all along. Sometimes, a battle for the Bible reveals itself to be a battle against the Bible.
It’s easy to see this within the tragedy of 1 man’s life, one denomination’s history. But the reality is that each one in every of us are vulnerable to the search for somebody to identify the spots we’re free to disobey. That’s a hill on which to die. It’s not the identical thing, you already know: going for the jugular and being washed within the blood.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
