PREFACE
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 2004, I started in earnest to write this book, which I had been thinking about for quite some time. That day was also the beginning of my last month as an “employee” of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
On June 23, 1966, my wife, June, and I were appointed missionaries to Japan by the Foreign Mission Board, now International Mission Board (IMB), of the SBC. We arrived in Japan on September 1, 1966. Then, for nearly two years we attended the Tokyo School of the Japanese Language, where we studied the challenging language of our adopted country.
In the summer of 1968, we moved to Fukuoka City in southwest Japan, and on September 1, exactly 36 years before first writing this, I became a full-time faculty member at Seinan Gakuin University (SGU).[1] I taught Christian Studies exclusively for the first twelve years there. Because of its Christian roots, these were required courses for students in the literature, commerce, economics, and law departments, in which more than 98% of the students were not Christians. From 1980 until the end of September 2004, I was a full-time professor in the Department of Theology at SGU, and during my last twenty-five years at Seinan Gakuin, I also held several different administrative positions, including department dean (1993~95) and ultimately Chancellor of the entire school complex from April 1996 through March 2004.[2]
The thirty-eight years from September 1, 1966, until when I began to write of this book passed very quickly, it seems, and it was an exciting time, days and years filled with challenge and manifold opportunities for witness and service. The final years of our missionary career, however, were clouded by a strong shift, in the SBC and elsewhere, toward Christian conservatism, interpreted by many as fundamentalism. Consequently, we were caught in the stormy winds of change which led to our being forced to retire as Southern Baptist missionaries.
My Baptist Context
While clearly the issues explored in these pages are broader than any one denomination, and also broader than the Christian religion, this book was first written primarily with Baptists—pastors and lay people in Baptist churches across the United States—in mind. More particularly, it was written with special consideration of current and former members of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which has experienced what is sometimes called a “conservative resurgence” over the previous twenty-five years. Others refer to that change as the “fundamentalist takeover” of the SBC.
Regardless of the label, for many of us who were not in agreement with the movement, the fact that the SBC steadily moved toward fundamentalism was a sad reality. Consequently, many of us became fed up with fundamentalism, and in this book I am attempting to express as clearly as possible why that is so. What I write in these chapters, though, should be of considerable interest not just to Baptists but to all Christians who are troubled by the pervasiveness of Christian fundamentalism up to the present time.
Baptist Roots. Still, I first wrote this from my own religious context, which was Baptist from the beginning. My Baptist roots run deep. Not only had I been a Baptist all my life when this book was first published, my parents, three of my grandparents, and many other forebears and relatives had also been active Baptist believers. In April 1946, when I was seven years old, I made a profession of faith and was baptized, becoming a member of the Grant City (Mo.) Baptist Church, and I was a member of that church until leaving for college in the fall of 1955.
My father, Hollis (1915~2007), was a Baptist deacon for far more than 50 years, and my mother, Helen (1914~2008), was active in Women’s Missionary Union (WMU) and other Baptist church activities through the years.[3] My grandfather, George Seat (1878~1952), was an active member in the New Hope Church in Worth County, Missouri, a Baptist church that was started in 1877. That church’s meetinghouse stands on land that was donated by his grandfather, Franklin Seat (1818~ 1905), and the first person to be buried in the adjacent cemetery was Franklin’s mother, Elizabeth (1795~1878). Franklin’s father, Littleton Seat (1788~1845), moved with his wife and children to what was then Gentry County, Missouri, in 1844, and he died the following year, the same year the Southern Baptist Convention was formed.
Baptist Education and Service. In addition to having deep Baptist roots, my entire higher education was completed within Baptist circles. In the fall of 1955, I enrolled in Southwest Baptist College (SWBC, now Southwest Baptist University) in Bolivar, Missouri, and in my second and final year there I served as president of the Baptist Student Union. In May 1957, the month that we graduated from SWBC, June Tinsley and I were married in the Rondo Baptist Church, her home church a few miles north of Bolivar. That fall we both transferred to William Jewell College (WJC), the oldest Baptist college west of the Mississippi River.
At the graduation service at WJC in 1959, I was the recipient of a centennial scholarship to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Beginning my theological studies there that September, in 1962 I earned the Bachelor of Divinity degree, which was equivalent to today’s Master of Divinity degree. That fall I enrolled in the graduate school of the same institution. During those years I was a fellow for Dr. Hugo Culpepper and Dr. Carl Hunker, professors of missions, and also was a teaching fellow for one year. I finished all the requirements for my Doctor of Theology degree (later changed to a Ph.D.) in August 1966, the same month we left as missionaries to Japan.
Not only was I born and reared a Southern Baptist and educated in Southern Baptist schools of higher learning, I was also a preacher in and pastor of Southern Baptist churches from an early age. At the age of 16, I preached my first sermon in a Sunday evening worship service in the Worth Baptist Church in November 1954.[4] I preached in a number of other churches before entering college in the fall of 1955. After my freshmen year in college, I was called to be the youth pastor of First Baptist Church, Windsor, Missouri, during the summer of 1956. In November of that year, Cherry Street Chapel, a mission of the First Baptist Church in Windsor, called me to be their pastor. The Chapel later became the Calvary Baptist Church when it moved into its own facilities and then organized as an independent church.
Before enrolling in seminary in the fall of 1959, I was called as pastor of the Ekron Baptist Church in Meade County, Kentucky, and served in that position for four years and three months. Then after about six months as a full-time graduate student, I was called as pastor of the Clay City Baptist Church in Powell County, Kentucky, and served in that pastorate from February 1964 to September 1965. Our appointment as missionaries was partly due to the recommendations received from members in these Southern Baptist churches that we had served during our college and seminary days.[5]
During our furlough years, I taught in Southern Baptist institutions in the United States—at Southwest Baptist University in 1972, at William Jewell College in 1976-77 and again in 1981-82. In 1986-87 and again in 1991-92 I was the visiting professor of missions at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City. Those two years at Midwestern were very enjoyable ones for me—but the latter came just before the changes that greatly altered that seminary, as well as the other five Southern Baptist seminaries.[6]
My Problem with Southern Baptists
Because of what the Southern Baptist Convention has become, however, I am one among many who was no longer able to remain a Southern Baptist. Thus, in 2012 June and I joined Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kansas—but I definitely did not jettison my identity as a baptist (with a small b).[7] Because of the “conservative resurgence” and much of what has accompanied it, though, I became fed up with fundamentalism, and this was partially because it had greatly changed the Southern Baptist Convention that I had known, and loved, through the years.
An Embarrassed Southern Baptist. The movement toward fundamentalism has, for example, changed the nature of all the Southern Baptist seminaries. Consequently, I could no longer feel any pride in my alma mater, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But what is more, the convention itself has changed, so I could no longer take delight in the work and activities of the Southern Baptist Convention, to which I had belonged from the time I was seven years old until we retired as SBC missionaries. From the age of twenty-eight to sixty-six, from 1966 to 2004, as an appointee of the Foreign Mission Board (International Mission Board), I was an “employee” of the SBC. But through the years, being known as Southern Baptists became increasingly embarrassing to June and me.[8]
Problems with The Baptist Faith and Message 2000. My embarrassment as a Southern Baptist is related partially to the changes in the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M) in 1998 and again in 2000. To many of us who opposed those changes, it seemed clear that it was because of fundamentalist ideas that those changes were made. But not only was the BF&M changed, in 2002 it became necessary for all of the missionaries under appointment by the International Mission Board to sign that we would work “in accordance with and not contrary to” the Baptist Faith and Message 2000—or take the consequences. None of us missionaries at Seinan Gakuin University were able in good conscience to sign the required document. That was partly because of what seemed to us to be a non-Baptistic “creedalism” and partly because of our disagreement with the content of the revised BF&M.
For several years June and I had planned to finish our work in Japan in the summer of 2004 and return to the U.S. for the usual transitional “final stateside assignment,” which in past years was called “retirement furlough.” Because of my heavy duties at Seinan Gakuin, I had been on furlough (or stateside assignment) only eighty days since the summer of 1992, so we had accumulated the maximum length of time for stateside assignment, fourteen months, which we planned to begin in August 2004. But because we had not signed the required agreement with the BF&M, at the May 2003 IMB Trustees Meeting we were unilaterally placed on final stateside assignment, effective August 1, 2003—so this is what we mean when we say we were forced to retire.
For some of my missionary colleagues at Seinan Gakuin University who were not close to retirement, refusing to sign the BF&M, 2000, meant deciding to resign from the International Mission Board (IMB) and to seek employment as full-time faculty members paid directly by SGU—and they were so employed.[9] Lydia Barrow-Hankins, another colleague and an ordained minister, was terminated by the IMB and was subsequently employed to serve as the chaplain of Seinan Gakuin.[10]
When we were unilaterally placed on stateside assignment effective August 1, 2003, we informed the administrators at the IMB that we had responsibilities and commitments that made it imperative that we remain in Japan until the summer of 2004. Somewhat surprisingly, we were allowed to remain in Japan and have our “final stateside assignment” there. In spite of the deteriorating relationship with the IMB, we were able to focus on the work at hand, and the culminating year of our thirty-eight years in Japan was a productive and meaningful time with our Japanese colleagues and friends. But when we left Japan on July 31, 2004, we had only two months of stateside assignment left. In effect, our not signing the required document cost us a year’s salary.
By the summer of 2004, though, June and I were both past sixty-five, and we were able to commence receiving social security benefits. In addition, we were allowed to move into the lovely missionary home in Bolivar, Missouri, provided by the Mid-Lakes Southern Baptist Association.[11] Bolivar is the home of Southwest Baptist University, which was a small junior college when June and I met there in the fall of 1955—and Bolivar is where June’s mother, Lero Tinsley Frazier (1915~2008), lived from 1958 until shortly before her death. So for us, personally, the situation worked out much better than it might have. The main grief and sadness we suffered was because of the changes in the Southern Baptist Convention as we knew it through the years from an organization of mission-minded, cooperating Christians into groups of fighting factions.[12]
The Purpose and Intended Tone of This Book
Even though I was, and am, fed up with fundamentalism, I did not write this book because of anger, bitterness, or malice. I have experienced a great sense of loss and sadness, though. But more than any personal sense of loss and sadness, I have written with sad concern for the many who have left, or who are contemplating leaving, the Southern Baptist Convention, and maybe the baptist fold altogether, because of the ascendancy of fundamentalism within the SBC.[13] I have written with sorrow because of the way many “moderate” friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have been “purged” from their places of service and caused to suffer psychologically and, in many cases, financially. Most of all, I have written with sadness because I believe that fundamentalism has injured the cause of Christ and the mission of the Church.
Thus, as fairly and as sympathetically as possible, in this book I have endeavored to elucidate what I consider the major weaknesses or problems with fundamentalism, and I seek to show that there is a better way to understand and to live the Christian faith. I hope that those who read this book will come to understand fundamentalism better—and, as needed, also come to embrace a more Biblical and more balanced understanding of the Christian faith.
With an Irenic Spirit and with Hope. In writing this book, I have tried to steer clear of denigrating those who continue to hold a fundamentalist understanding of Christianity, and I have not used, and do not condone, use of condescending terms, such as fundies. I have tried to set forth as clearly and as forcefully as possible the reasons I am fed up with fundamentalism and the reasons for holding and forwarding an alternative position. But I have tried to do this with an irenic spirit and with the earnest hope that even where there is definite disagreement there still might be fruitful dialogue.
In the introduction of his splendid book, A Generous Orthodoxy (2004), Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Maryland, said he was writing that book for those who are not Christians “and wondering why anyone would want to be” and for those thinking about becoming a Christian but worried that if they did become a Christian they might become a worse person—“judgmental, arrogant, narrow-minded, bigoted, and brainwashed.” His book, McLaren says, was also written for Christians who are “struggling, questioning, and looking for reasons to stay in” and for those who “may have officially left the Christian community but are wondering if they might someday return” (pp. 15-16).
While the content of this book is considerably different from A Generous Orthodoxy, my purpose and intended audience, in general, is similar to McLaren’s. But more particularly, this book is being written for the great number of people who are, or who have been, Southern Baptists but who are considering leaving or have already left the baptist fold because of problems they have encountered in fundamentalist ideology and/or actions.
Even though this book is being written for a general audience rather than for scholars, I have examined the most relevant books relating to fundamentalism.[14] In addition, I have included numerous explanatory footnotes—far more than usual for a book for the general public. For those who want to spend less time reading this book, it is not necessary to read any of the footnotes. But for those who would like to have more information about various people, books, and events, the footnotes provide facts and explanations that should be helpful in that regard.
“Ten Commandments” for the Author and the Readers of This Book. I have tried to write this book with the following “ten commandments” in mind, and I hereby ask all who read this book to consider well these commandments as you read.
1. You shall always seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness and evaluate all your own actions and assertions in that light.
2. You shall not elevate any of your own personal ideas, beliefs, or convictions to divine status.
3. You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain by claiming divine sanction for your own ideas.
4. You shall acknowledge your own finite and sinful nature and, thus, the limited scope of your perspective.
5. You shall respect the traditions of your forebears, but you shall not honor tradition above the leading of God’s Spirit.
6. You shall not assassinate the character or reputation of anyone, no matter how strongly you may disagree with them.
7. You shall not bear false witness against those who disagree with you, but you shall articulate fairly, honestly, and thoroughly the positions of your opponents.
8. You shall follow the path toward truth even when it challenges your previous conclusions and beliefs.
9. You shall be careful not “to marry the spirit of the age, knowing that if you do, you will soon be left a widow.”
10. You shall listen, study, and seek to understand opposing positions, always being willing to engage in serious dialogue.[15]
I invite you now to read and reflect upon each of the following chapters which indicate why I am fed up with fundamentalism and which depict the characteristics of the Christian faith that I commend as its replacement. This is done in the desire to be faithful to Jesus Christ, whom I serve as Lord. When C.K. Dozier, the founder of Seinan Gakuin, was on his deathbed in 1933, his last words were, “Tell Seinan to be true to Christ.” Through the years, first as a Seinan Gakuin University faculty member and then as Chancellor of the Seinan Gakuin school complex, I sought to be true to Christ in my own thoughts and actions, and I also frequently encouraged others to be true to Christ. And now, my deepest desire in writing this book is to be true to Christ myself and also to help all who read this book to be true to Christ to the highest extent.
Leroy Seat, Ph.D
Leroy Seat, Ph.D
4-L Ministries
LKSeat@gmail.com
[1] Seinan Gakuin (Southwest Academy) was founded in 1916 as a small “mission school” for boys by Southern Baptist missionary C.K. Dozier from Georgia. Seinan Gakuin is now a large school complex; Seinan Gakuin University, which includes five graduate schools and a law school, has more than 8,000 full-time students, and Seinan Gakuin Junior-Senior High School has nearly 2,000 students. There is now also an elementary school, a kindergarten, and a nursery school as part of the school complex. Seinan Gakuin still maintains strong ties with the Japan Baptist Convention, the convention which grew out of the work of Southern Baptist missionaries in Japan.
[2] The academic year in Japan starts on April 1, so my tenure as Chancellor was for two full four-year terms, and I was the only non-Japanese to serve for eight consecutive years since C.K. Dozier, the founder.
[3] During the last several years of their life, my parents were active members of the Allendale Baptist Church, seven miles east of Grant City. In August 2004, my wife and I attended Allendale Church’s WMU meeting, which was hosted by my mother. Of the eight members present, she and two other women were past 90 years of age.
[4] It was a thrill for me to have the opportunity to preach at the Worth Baptist Church again in November 2004 to mark my fifty years in the ministry, and I appreciate the effort made by my good friends and fellow pastors, Joe Wolven, Bob Pinkerton, and Lowell Houts (who is also my first cousin) to be present for that service.
[5] It was also a thrill to preach at the Sunday morning worship service at Ekron in September 2004 as they celebrated their centennial and to preach at a regular Sunday morning worship service at the Clay City Church in February 2005. June and I enjoyed seeing old and dear friends at both of these churches on those occasions.
[6] In his detailed book The Baptist Reformation: The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention (Broadman & Holman, 2000), Jerry Sutton points out that Midwestern was the “last seminary to be influenced and impacted by the Conservative Resurgence” and he says that it was identified by some as “the last bastion of moderatism” (p. 383). Conservatives did not gain a clear majority of trustees at Midwestern until 1991, and it was the next year before major changes began to occur.
[7] This is a distinction well made by the Baptist (baptist) theologian James McClendon (1924~2000). In the preface and first chapter of Ethics (Abingdon, 1986; revised and enlarged, 2002), the first of his three-volume series titled Systematic Theology, McClendon introduces the use of baptist with a small b.
[8] This embarrassment is rather widespread among Southern Baptists—or former Southern Baptists. My good friend and former colleague, Dr. E. Luther Copeland, declared: “Never have so many Southern Baptists been troubled and embarrassed by their denominational identity” (The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of An Original Sin [University Press of America, revised edition, 2002], p. 2; the first edition of Dr. Copeland’s book was published in 1999).
[9] The three colleagues who went this route are Gary Barkley in the Department of Theology, David Johnson in the Department of Human Sciences, and Karen Schaffner in the Department of Intercultural Studies. Through the years, the salaries of missionary teachers, or educational missionaries, had been paid by the Foreign (International) Mission Board. It was gratifying to see that when “push came to shove,” Seinan Gakuin was willing to employ these three professors directly, as this was, in part, an indication that SG had truly valued the services of SB missionaries through the years. Even more remarkably, since then Barkley and Schaffner were, successively, elected to serve as president of the university—and Barkley was also elected by the trustees to two terms as Chancellor of the Seinan Gakuin school system.
[10] Lydia and her husband, Ron, were terminated as Southern Baptist missionaries by action of the Board of Trustees in May 2003. Lydia was then employed by Seinan Gakuin effective September 2003, and Ron became a part-time teacher at SGU and also found other employment not directly related to Seinan Gakuin.
[11] We had applied for this missionary home three or four years previously, but we had wondered whether our “forced retirement” would jeopardize our use of that residence. In spite of the change, the Association graciously allowed us to occupy the missionary residence, for which we remain grateful.
[12] Southern Baptists in Missouri are also divided among three state entities: the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC), the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Missouri (CBFMO), and the Baptist General Convention of Missouri (now known as Churchnet). Having attended the annual gatherings of all three groups in October 2004 and in April 2005, in all honesty I must say there was far more belligerence expressed by the MBC than by the two newer groups. There is also a strong spirit of cooperation between CBFMO and Churchnet, but the MBC expresses only opposition to those two groups.
[13] Although all four of our children are Christians and have all been members of Southern Baptist churches in the past, not surprisingly none of them attend a Southern Baptist church now.
[14] By far, the most extensive study of fundamentalism is that which has been made by the Fundamentalism Project, directed by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. The first of five volumes produced in this project was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991 under the title Fundamentalisms Observed and edited by Marty and Appleby. I admit that I have not read this 850+ volume in its entirety, partly because more than half of the chapters are about fundamentalism in non-Christian religions.
The first chapter of Fundamentalisms Observed, and by far the one most relevant to this book, was written by Nancy T. Ammerman and titled “North American Protestant Fundamentalism.” Ammerman (b. 1950) is a 1972 graduate of Southwest Baptist University, and when I started writing this book, her parents were members of the First Baptist Church in Bolivar, Missouri, where we were living
[15] The idea for these ten commandments came from the chapter titled “The Ten Commandments of Moderate Political Behavior,” in How Right is the Right? A Biblical and Balanced Approach to Politics (Zondervan, 1996), by Randall L. Frame and Alan Tharpe, and some of these are adapted from that source. The ninth commandment is adapted from the well-known statement of William Ralph Inge, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1911 to 1934.
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