This summer, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is celebrating the centennial of the Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M), the denomination’s confessional statement. When the SBC was formed in 1845, the Convention didn’t adopt a confession of faith. This was not because most Southern Baptists rejected confessions. In fact, all 293 of the delegates, as they were then called, were members of churches or associations that had adopted a version of the Second London Confession, an English Baptist confession that dated to 1677. The SBC didn’t adopt a confession at its inception because the Convention’s scope was limited to foreign and domestic mission work, and all the cooperating churches were of substantially similar faith and practice. Furthermore, most congregations were part of local associations that were decidedly confessional.
By 1925, the situation had changed. The Convention had grown to include three seminaries (all of which had confessions of faith), a Sunday School Board, and a recently formed Executive Committee. Southern Baptist churches were now found all over the South and Southwest and much of the Midwest, and they were beginning to expand into other regions even further from the Convention’s traditional territory. Southern Baptist churches were cooperating together for far more reasons than had been the case 80 years earlier, and they were just entering into a four-decade span of unprecedented growth both numerically and institutionally. A more localized confessionalism seemed ill-suited to ensure doctrinal fidelity across Southern Baptist life.
1925 was also a crucial year in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. The Scopes Trial brought debates about Darwinism and biblical teachings about origins into the national conversation. The Northern Baptist Convention, which shared a common theological heritage with Southern Baptists, but which had in recent years become far more tolerant of modernist theology, voted by a 2-1 margin to not adopt the New Hampshire Confession of Faith (1833) as its doctrinal standard. While the SBC was far more conservative theologically than their Northern Baptist counterparts, there were instances of liberal drift in some of their schools and a handful of churches.
So, Southern Baptists took a crucial step toward maintaining denominational faithfulness by adopting the Baptist Faith and Message (1925), their first Convention-wide confessional statement. When Neo-Orthodox views of Scripture became more common in Baptist schools a generation later, the BF&M was revised in 1963 to address those challenges. The BF&M was amended in 1998 to clearly address a biblical view of gender and family. Two years later, following a two-decade controversy between theological conservatives and progressives, the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) was adopted. It remains the Convention’s confessional statement a quarter-century later.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
Nathan is a professor of faith and culture and directs the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University in Tigerville, S.C. He is the senior fellow for religious liberty for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is a senior fellow for the Land Center for Cultural Engagement, and is a senior editor for Integration: A Journal of Faith and Learning. He also serves as teaching pastor at the First Baptist Church of Taylors, S.C.
