95 Thesis for 2023: Baptist Edition

In honor of the anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis, I am writing 95 theses of my own with my own Baptist flavor. I last did this a few years ago. While there are some changes, the list remains quite similar.

I

1. The Bible is the final authority of faith and practice. All religious ideas and traditions are subject to correction by the Scriptures.
2. With the Bible as the final authority, pastors and theologians should be conversant in the works of Anselm, Aquinas, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Augustine, Boethius, Clement, Calvin, Luther, and many others. Yes, the Bible does have final authority, but listening to ancient sources enriches our reading of the Bible. Knowing these sources does not mean building the faith on a foundation other than Scripture.
3. Placing Paul against Jesus is a significant mistake and should be completely rejected. It is a misuse of the “Jesus Criterion” of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message. When someone says, “Jesus said nothing about _____…” Rest assured they are trying to baptize a behavior the Bible has defined as sin.
4. “Unhitching” the Old Testament from the New Testament is to fail to understand either. It borders on the Marcionite heresy rejected by the Early Church. The Old Testament is a treasure once read correctly. Understanding the Old Testament enlightens the New Testament.
5. Unhitching is not even possible. The New Testament quotes, alludes to, or echoes the Old Testament on virtually every page.

II

6. Science and faith are not antithetical to each other. Science is the study of the observable universe. God is, by definition, not within the observable universe.
7. One can believe in miraculous interventions of God and believe in science as well.
8. Science is a limited field; it can only describe reality. It cannot answer questions about the meaning and purpose of life, if there is a God, what God is like, or if there is life after death. Those questions are beyond its scope.
9. Attempting to make science the judge of what is right and wrong is mistaken. Science does not yield ethics.
10. What is natural is not necessarily good. Hemlock is natural. Rats eat their young. Male lions murder cubs when they take over a pride. Saying something occurs in nature and it is good for that reason is the Naturalistic Fallacy.
11. Only appealing to the concept of God when encountering a scientific mystery diminishes both science and faith. Do not use God as the explanation for gaps in scientific understanding. When thinkers use God that way, they have a God who shrinks with every discovery.

III

12. As Calvin notes, the human mind is an idol factory.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
13. Humans tend to make God in our own image, after our own likeness.
14. Among many modern thinkers, the concept of God’s wrath is strangely missing. God’s wrath is the negative side of God’s love (Karl Barth).
15. Without a sense of God’s wrath, salvation makes little sense. One cannot know grace without understanding what sin has merited.
16. God is God and not a more powerful version of us (Karl Barth). The “God” we often imagine is one of us, like us, and not particularly threatening.
17. Therefore, this “God” is not particularly interesting or important.
18. Many ideas of God bear little resemblance to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
19. God is beyond the need for emotions as we know them.
20. For example, humans often have to be moved to act with compassion. God does not. Because God is love, God does not have to be moved to do the loving thing. God acts in love because it is God’s nature. God is not love because He happens to do the loving thing. God is love because love is God’s essence.
21. God is God’s own source of bliss (Boethius). God needs nothing external to make Him happy.
22. God does not need creation to self-actualize.
23. God is not just good. God is The Good, goodness itself.
24. God is not just beautiful, God is the source of all beauty, beauty itself. The same is true of the other aspects of God including wisdom and being.

IV

25. God is Father, Son, and Spirit.
26. There is one mind in God.
27. There is one will in God. In the incarnation, Jesus has a divine and human will. The two wills in the incarnation are only possible, however, because God is one from eternity.
28. Therefore, concepts like Eternal Filial Subordination (EFS) are outside the bounds of orthodoxy. EFS assumes multiple wills in God because submission or subordination is only possible if there are multiple opinions and desires. If in eternity past, God had multiple wills, then there would be 3 Gods, not one.
29. Most struggles understanding the Trinity are born of using modern definitions of the word “person.”
30. Using Human analogies for God is a very bad idea. Most of them are heretical. Refrain from using an orange, ice, or a father as an analogy for God in your children’s sermons.
31. The Trinity is NOT a social program.
32. Using the Trinity to argue for another ideological or theological commitment is entirely inappropriate. I have seen people argue for socialism and compatibilism based on the Trinity. This practice is wholly out of bounds. If a thinker is redefining the Trinity in support of a social or political cause, idolatry is practically inevitable. Redefining God for another agenda is practically the definition of idolatry.
33. Humans cannot approximate the Divine life in earthly existence. We cannot live in relationships the way the Trinity does.

V

34. The practice of preparing and qualifying ministers in Baptist life is deeply problematic.
35. Seminary education takes too long and costs too much.
36. The denominations with the steepest declines are the ones with the best-educated clergy, as a rule. This alone should require rethinking the process.
37. The process of becoming ordained in a Baptist church is too simple and fraught with danger for congregations and individual Christians. Evil persons can manipulate the process with relative ease and gain access to innocents.
38. In Baptist life, for the protection of children, there must be a way to defrock a minister.
39. Honorary doctorates should never be used as a qualification on a resume. One should not refer to himself as a doctor if he has only been awarded an honorary doctorate. John MacArthur is an example of one who has done this in the past.
40. The practice of moving a troubled minister from church to church has led to abuse and should be stopped.
41. Believing any group of people is immune from clergy abuse is magical thinking.
42. The abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention is horrendous. Also horrendous is that those in power could have done more.
43. Those knew who of Paul Pressler’s abuses and remained silent should face ecclesiastical and legal consequences.
44. Those who are currently trying to curry favor with Paige Patterson even knowing of his rank misogyny are doing damage to the SBC.
45. The SBC needs to reckon with the fact that the Conservative Resurgence was planned by a credibly accused pedophile (Pressler)[1] and a confirmed misogynist (Patterson).[2] [3] [4]
46. Investigating sexual abuse and prevention of sexual abuse are not distractions from the Great Commission.

VI

47. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) now shares much in common with Mainline Protestantism.
48. The energy, youth, and leadership of the CBF are from the theological left.
49. The Illumination Project caused deep harm to the CBF but will not be undone.
50. If a seminary or divinity school has gay students who receive the support of the faculty, scholarship funds  graduate with ministerial credentials, and they make no statement consistent with the New Testament’s view of sexuality, then they have given tacit support to gays in ministry.
51. The CBF needs to reckon with the fact that many of the accusations made against them by SBC conservatives have come true.

VII

52. The Image of God is a calling not a characteristic.
53. If the Image of God were something like reason or intellect, then loss of that would mean a person is less in the image of God when these capacities are diminished.
54. The Image of God is a function. Humans represent God on earth.
55. Every time the image of God is violated, suffering results.
56. Racism is a violation of the image of God.
57. Christianity is not the cause of racism. It is the cure. What we call racism was basic to the belief systems of most cultures before the advent of Christianity. St. Paul reminds us there is no “…Jew or Greek…”

VIII

58. Ideologies foreign to the Gospel often attempt to use Biblical language and imagery to support political and social movements.
59. Biblical justice is often at variance with modern theories of justice. Reading modern theories of justice back into the Biblical text is not only anachronistic, it is an abuse of the Scripture.
60. Using oppressor/oppressed dichotomies when reading the Bible is an anachronistic practice.
61. Using the term Communism to describe the sharing of the Early Church is anachronistic.
62. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual reality, not a socio-political reality.
63. The Kingdom of God is not reducible to liberal, democratic capitalism.
64. One can argue for the care of the poor and oppressed without resorting to socialist theology.
65. More people have been liberated from extreme poverty in the last 50 years than in the rest of human history.
66. Liberation theology is a repurposing of the Christian faith, not the faith itself.
67. The purpose of theology is to correctly describe God, salvation, humanity, and the other areas it touches. Theology is not a paradigm for social change.
68. All human ideologies are flawed.
69. “Whoever marries the spirit of the age will find himself a widower in the next,” William Inge.
70. The Church is not the Kingdom of God.
71. Marriage between Church and state is a detriment to both. Christian nationalism, as I understand it, is a recipe for human suffering.

IX

72. One cannot hold the Bible as the final authority of faith and practice and reject the Bible’s teachings on human sexuality.
73. Countenancing LGBTQ+ clergy living with a partner before marriage is not just rejecting Paul’s teachings on homosexuality, but completely rejecting the sexual ethic of the New Testament.
74. To paraphrase Augustine, if you believe what you like in the Scriptures and reject what you do not like, it is not the Scriptures you believe but yourself.
75. Human sexual expression is designed for the context of marriage.
76. The regression of marriage will lead to the regression of society.

X

76. While it is difficult to imagine eternal separation from God, the Bible teaches it.
77. Election in Romans is corporate, not individual.
78. Jesus died for every person. To hold to Limited Atonement, one has to see passages in the Bible where “all” does not mean “all.” It is not clear that Calvin himself believed in Limited Atonement.
79. Human will is not entirely free. It is limited by genetics, moods, upbringing, and other factors. It is, however, important to hold to some form of freedom of the will because if not, God is the cause of evil.
80. God did not create evil to mature humans. God did not create evil.
81. Evil is the absence of good in the same way that darkness is the absence of light.
82. Arguing God is incapable of stopping evil is a misreading of the Bible.
83. Confusing evil and suffering misunderstands both.
84. Suffering is downstream of evil.
85. God is not the cause of evil. He does, however, use evil for our good.
86. There is nothing in evil that is good. Evil does not help us. God uses all events for our good.
87. The good the Scriptures imagine is not a good equal to the evil event or even happiness. The good Scriptures imagine is our Christlikeness.
88. There is no direct cause and effect between an evil action and suffering. Just because a person suffers does not mean they have done something bad to cause it.
89. There is a distinction between God allowing something to happen and God causing something to happen.
90. Outside divine revelation, evil is very difficult to define.
91. Outside divine revelation it is very difficult to construct ethical systems.
92. The 4 Greek cardinal virtues: courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom, are perhaps the best way of constructing ethical norms outside Scripture.

XI

93. Absence of faith sharing will cause the death of a congregation.
94. The laity are in the best position to share their faith.
95. Worship is the joy and duty of the believer. Consistently missing worship is toxic for faith. A believer is called to worship God regularly.

Also by Layne Wallace: 95 Thesis in 2021 

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/27/houston-jared-woodfill-gop-paul-pressler-southern-baptist/