As an early Christmas treat, I figured I should share the best bingo card I’ve seen in a while.
Mark Driscoll Apologism Bingo Card (on “Are Women Human?, an excellent blog worth looking around)
favorite spot on the card : “Jesus wasn’t just a gentle peacemaker”
No, really. go.
The post yesterday, about the Kingdom of God, ended on a note that mentioned that I don’t believe the Kingdom of God is found in the Institutional church. This, (heavily influenced by Moltmann) is kind of a continuation of that thought, and the converse: that being members of the Kingdom doesn’t mean we ignore institutions.
This does not mean we are not to engage with institutions at all. Jesus practiced civil disobedience towards the Sabbath laws of the time, gathering grain and healing as he followed the Will of his Father. Jesus acted against institutional power when he ran the money changers out of the temple. A whole economy operated out of the temple, which could be thought of as a “modest shopping mall.” (Kraybill, The Upside Down Kingdom, p. 57) The temple was the center of commerce, religion and government. Jerusalem was New York, Rome and Washington D.C. at one place for the Israelites. But the people exchanged money and sold the necessary sacrifices at airport-level prices, making a profit off of God. When Jesus chased them out, he shut down the temple, the economy of Jerusalem for a moment. This was the equivalent of throwing everyone on wall street out for the day.
Said another way, we see that Jesus called us to live together in community, the function of us as gathered people provides its own power and leverage in any system. God did not call us to live alone as believers, knowing that every belief has social implications. Anyone living in a family knows that a job loss does not simply affect the breadwinner, but the entire family. Rarely do personal consequences apply only to one person.
So again, how do we “go out”? How do we stop responding to the world, not claiming the responsibility of stewardship as God gave us? We will never fix these evils forever. We have a lot to lose and little to gain or make right for God. Our best intentions may even go wrong and cause harm, as we have seen come out of early missions and the destruction of culture, or when we offer food-aid to countries that makes it unprofitable for people to grow their own grain. We can start with the Lord’s prayer. We can start with scripture. Scripture tells us to take care of the earth. Scripture tells us to love our neighbors. Scripture tells us to feed the hungry. Scripture tells us to forgive the people who owe us money. Consider forgiving money you lent a recognition that it was never yours in the first place, simply God’s to take care of. Everything God has given you is a tool to use for his Kingdom. Job understood this. If God removes those tools, whether it be house or car or health or life itself on this world, we still praise him as Lord.
Everything has been a gift. Praise God.
I’m not sure where this is going, if anywhere at all, but it’s a little something that I’ve been working out with God over the past semester thanks to Dr. Roger Olson’s Kingdom of God class. These are just… unfinished journal thoughts that have ended up in the “possible sermon idea” binder, or the “possibly need to learn to read scripture better and get a better theology” binder, so take them for that. Thank y’all for listening as always.
The Beginning is Near: The Kingdom of God
Like our salvation, the Kingdom of God will not be dependent on our efforts. We cannot save ourselves, and nothing we do will affect the timing of God’s return. But also like our salvation, we must respond to it. Paul writes to the Philippians, “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” (Philippians 2:12-13) God has a use for us in this world. We are not to focus inwardly or upwardly towards “the mansion in the sky” at the expense of our neighbor.
Where does this allow us to rest? Jesus tells us, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” ( Matthew 11:30) Consistently working “to be perfect”, knowing the result is outside of your control sounds far more demoralizing than it does peaceful. The trick is in knowing that we delude ourselves when we pretend that our will is what is done. “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” Jesus asks. (Matthew 6:27) The ends, how things work out, is always out of our control. But when we stop worrying, when we stop fighting the Will of God and prayerfully petition God in a model consistent with Philippians 4:6, we find none of it matters. God has found us, God is our Father, we do not adopt him. Augustine writes in City of God that we are regenerated as Children of God.(book 15) God cares more about spending the next steps of the journey with you than he needs you to do anything. We get to constantly start anew each day, each hour and each moment with God.
This world is not our world, it is still Gods. Jesus is not our hotel housekeeper, and we cannot treat the world like a hotel room we can trash and leave, knowing it will be clean for the next inhabitants. Scripture tells us to be careful stewards of what God entrusts us with. This involves the earth, as it suffered in the fall. The Kingdom means we are servants in God’s palace “here on Earth”.
This is another excerpt from my paper, THE DEVELOPMENT OF BAPTISM BY BAPTISTS IN SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND, for my Texts and Traditions 2 class at Truett Seminary this semester. The first one, what Baptism means for the church today can be found here.
This is more of the history about what Baptism meant.
AN OVERVIEW
The Baptist identity that developed out of the English Congregationalist Churches during the Puritan and Separatist movements against the Church of England in the 16th and 17th centuries.[1] For the Baptists of the 17th century, baptism was primarily a matter of ecclesiology. Like the Puritan groups that saw the established church as corrupt and the separatist groups that saw the need to leave altogether, Baptists were concerned with creating a pure church. For them, believer’s baptism was the communal identifier that they belonged to the true church.
In 1609, John Smyth and Thomas Helwys were members of the first church covenant based on believer’s baptism. Smyth believed that, “The Saynts as Kings rule the visible Church.”[2] Smyth’s congregation and the early General Baptists “came to erect a new church by baptism” as the only valid basis for church covenant.[3] This emphasis on the pure church and General Baptist closed membership extended so far that despite the similarities between different Baptists, those transferring membership had to be rebaptized, “Because You were baptized into the wrong Faith, and so into another Gospel.”[4]
The Particular Baptists, formed out of the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church during the 1630s also reasoned for a believer’s baptism. While both John Dupper, 1630, and Sam Eaton, 1633, may have practiced believer’s baptism, the first definitive Particular Baptist Church evidence supports is of John Spilsbury’s congregation in 1638. According to H. Leon McBeth, these Particular Baptists had different motives. Being strict separationists already, they denied the validity of any sacraments administered by the Church of England. They all had to be baptized a first, legitimate time. [5] The multiple exoduses that pushed the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey church into the Particular Baptist identity included people such as Samuel Eaton, John Murton, and Mark Luker. The Kiffin manuscript of church minutes, named after later Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey pastor William Kiffin, in 1640 described the moment the Jacob-Lathrop-Jessey Church came to the conclusion of believer’s baptism and baptism by immersion at the same time. Baptism, they claimed in the document church minutes, “Ought to be by dipping ye Body into ye Water, resembling Burial & riseing again. 2 Col 2.12. Rom: 6.4.”[6] Though Richard Blunt baptized the pastor, Henry Jessey, the church continued to be of mixed membership at times.
By 1660 the General Baptists had come to the same conclusion in the General Baptist Confession of London. A 1651 General Baptist confession noted the form of baptism understood in scripture “was to go into the water, and be baptized.”[7] The first clear affirmation of General Baptists using immersion was the Standard Confession of 1660. For the 17th century, language concerning baptism as a sacrament or an ordinance was interchangeable for Baptists, and that creeds usually adopted one word out of consistency.[8] It was in fact the General Baptists that used sacramental language to describe baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
[1] For the sake of space, I’m adopting Winthrop S. Hudson’s views on the origin of the Baptists. I could be entirely wrong, but this is also a practically useful decision because the modern Baptist church is more heavily influenced by Particular Baptists- also see David Bebbington, Baptists Through The Centuries : A History Of A Global People (Waco Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2010), 30–31.
[2] John Smyth, “The Differences of the Churches of the Seperation (1608),” in The Works of John Smyth (ed. William T Whitley; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 1:273, 274; in Bebbington, Baptists through the centuries, 33.
[3] John Robinson, William Allen, and John Waddington, The works of John Robinson: pastor of the pilgrim fathers (J. Snow, 1851), sec. 3:168; in Bebbington, Baptists through the centuries, 34.
[4] Luke Howard, A looking-glass for Baptists being a short narrative of their root and rice [i.e. rise] in Kent wherein the erronious spirit of Richard Hobbs (pastor of the Baptists in Dover, with some others ([London: s.n.], 1672), 5.
[5] This is not mentioned as a reason in Bebbington’s book, whether out of omission or disagreement I don’t know.
[6] Leon McBeth, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 45.
[7] W.L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Judson Press, 1959), 182.
[8] Curtis Freeman, “‘To Feed Upon by Faith’: Nourishment from the Lord’s Table”, n.d., 200–206; Anthony Cross and Philip E. Thompson, eds., Baptist Sacramentalism (Carlisle Cumbria ;;Waynesboro Ga.: Paternoster Press, 2003); in Brian Brewer, “‘Signs of the Covenant’: The Development of Sacramental Thought in Baptist Circles,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 36, no. 5 (Winter 2010): 410.
This is the second part of my essay, ” HOW PROMINENT WERE WOMEN IN BAPTIST LIFE OVER THE CENTURIES”, submitted to Dr. David Bebbington this term. This section again deals with men who were kinder in their thoughts towards women than the last section, but not fully egalitarian.
Other men fully recognized the spiritual authority of women but did not find it relevant for this world. Even though more than half of Providence Church was made up of women during its first two centuries, women are never listed as having any leadership roles.[1] For Lansing Burrows in the 19th century, he could affirm women’s spiritual equality but still remarked, “In things temporal, woman’s position in the church is one of subordination.” He had settled the question of women in authority firmly; “To honest Christian minds all that is necessary is to appeal to the testimony of the Scriptures.”[2] Some were more pragmatically against women in leadership. Mrs. Attatway was publically challenged by another woman who told her that women should not teach to the unbaptized, but only teach in closed church meetings. A tract in 1641 proclaimed, “Their only reason or cause of preaching was, that there was a deficiency of good men.” [3]
Even when women were accepted, it was not in full equality. Their prophesying and leadership was considered more miraculous because of their gender. Like the medieval mystics, they affirmed that Gods “strength appeared in weakness”, that they were the “weakest sex.” If a woman sought to fight a man outside of the church sphere, “as the rival of man, in the struggle for place, power and prominence, she as the ‘weaker vessel’ is doomed to defeat.”[4] Victorian attitudes towards gender left women to chase the ideal of “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”[5] Speaking out led Anna Trapnel to be accused of insanity and witchcraft in the 17th century. For southern white women, their role at home defined a woman’s role, “to be mother to her own large flock; model, guide, physician, provider, teacher, priestess to the slaves or around the big city home.”[6] In 1801, Alice Izard wrote a letter mentioning her father & her response to The Rights of Woman, that, “He is as much disgusted with the book as I am and calls the author a vulgar, impudent hussy.”[7] The purity of women was important to the purity of the South, which became more important after the Civil War.[8] At the end of the 19th century, Southern Baptist women were limited to, “Go to a meeting, sing, and make pies for the preacher” in the church.[9] In 1911, Texas Baptists declared that the Women’s Missionary Union was “a menace to the integrity of the churches.” because it was “known everywhere that our people in the South, as a rule, are unalterably opposed to this thing,” of women becoming a “leader – a speaker before mixed assemblies, a platform declaimer, a pulpit proclaimer, street preacher, lyceum lecturer, stump orator.”[10] At Southern Seminary and the WMU Training School, women were not involved in preaching ministry “by reminding students that a women’s primary sphere was in the home, even if her home were located in Africa.”[11]
[1] Pamela R. Durso, “Baptist women in America, 1638-1800” (n.d.): 198.
[2] Lansing Burrows, “Woman’s Position in the Church” (Bordentown, NJ, 1872), 3–4,20, AR 25, file folder 55, Lansing Burrows Papers, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville TN.; in Deweese, Women Deacons and Deaconesses, 7–8.
[3] Freeman, A Company of Women Preachers, 16.
[4] Religious Herald, n.d., (February 20, 1868), 2; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 79.
[5] Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 58.
[6] Fannie Exile Scudder Heck, In Royal Service: The Mission Work of Southern Baptist Women (Educational department, Foreign Mission boards, Southern Baptist Convention, 1913), 7; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 57.
[7] Wylma Wates, “Precursor to the Victorian Age: The Concept of Marriage and Family as Revealed in the Correspondence of the Izard Family of South Carolina”, n.d., 6; in Carol Bleser, In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900 (Oxford University Press, 1992); in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 75.
[8] Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (University of Georgia Press, 2009), 47.
[9] McBeth, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage, 335.
[10] Baptist Women Mission Workers of Texas, Minutes, 1911; Biblical Recorder, 1892; Western Recorder, 1888; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 93–94.
[11] T. Laine Scales, All that fits a woman: training Southern Baptist women for charity and mission, 1907-1926 (Mercer University Press, 2000), 64–65; in Holcomb, “Mothering the South,” 145.
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin