Battling Over the Bible

By Richard N. Ostling

Driving all night in their cars, riding by chartered or scheduled bus, by plane, on foot, they came. And came. The 45,431 voters, known as "messengers," spilled over from a convention center in Dallas to fill two other amphitheaters, all of the halls linked by closed-circuit TV for the biggest church business meeting in U.S. history.* The issue was momentous: ideological control of the country's largest Protestant denomination, the 14.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.

At stake was the one-year presidency of the 140-yearold S.B.C., a rich denomination (1984 revenues: $3.7 billion) with 36,740 congregations across the U.S. The contenders for S.B.C.'s chief office were Atlanta Incumbent Charles Stanley, 52, and Challenger Winfred Moore, 65, of Amarillo, Texas. Both men are conservative Bible thumpers who shepherd booming congregations, but one crucial difference divides them: the professorial Stanley is one of a group of Fundamentalists who mean to restore a doctrinal hard line. Moore, a lanky, "moderate" charmer, favors a live-and-let-live policy. In the end Stanley won, with a commanding 55.3% of the computerized ballot cards.

Stanley's triumph was the seventh Fundamentalist victory in seven years. Moderates fear it may prove the pivot al one. The Fundamentalists have been seeking power in the S.B.C. to press the cause of "inerrancy," the belief that the Bible is error-free in all historical details. They especially demand that this viewpoint be taught at the six S.B.C. seminaries, which enroll 11,000 students. One of the six, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, is the largest such school in the world. The S.B.C. presidency is an honorific job (all S.B.C. churches are self-governing), but it carries indirect power over appointments to the boards that govern those influential seminaries. There were moderates who predicted that some S.B.C. employees would lose their jobs. But Stanley discounts the threat of a major witch hunt. "There are problems," he says, "and we will deal with them a little at a time."

The severity of the split in S.B.C. ranks was dramatized in two opposing mass meetings the day before the balloting. At a gathering of moderates, Fort Worth Pastor Cecil Sherman belittled the Fundamentalists' attempt to "restore a day that is gone." The other meeting featured the Rev. W.A. Criswell of Dallas, grandiloquent elder statesman of the Fundamentalists, who had sent a form letter to 36,000 S.B.C. clergy urging votes for Stanley. To his audience, Criswell thundered, "Is the theological seminary an appropriate place for a general massacring of Christian theology? Whether we continue to live or ultimately die lies in our dedication to the infallible Word of God."

As pre-election passions mounted, the Fundamentalist wing leaked word that Evangelist Billy Graham had phoned an aide from Europe, asking him to convey his personal backing of Stanley. Earlier, Graham, the best-known clergyman of the S.B.C., had said that he would steer clear of the political dispute.

The smoldering quarrel between the Fundamentalists and moderates intensified in 1969, when the S.B.C. Sunday School Board began issuing serially the multivolume Broadman Bible Commentary. The project was established to summarize Southern Baptist thinking. The 56 theologians involved made mild use of "higher criticism" (theorizing about literary sources underlying Bible texts), and the introduction to the series undermined the concept of inerrancy. In 1970 the annual convention forced a rewrite of the program's Genesis commentary to make it more conservative.

All Southern Baptists agree that the Bible is the only basis for faith, but the two camps differ over how literally the Scriptures should be interpreted. In the Broadman series, for example, sections contributed by President Roy Honeycutt of the S.B.C. seminary in Louisville contend that substantial portions of Exodus were written centuries after Moses, that Moses probably had an "inner experience" of God instead of seeing an actual burning bush, and that the Bible stories of the plagues of Pharaoh or the Prophet Elisha's miracles may well have been reshaped or exaggerated in transmission. That is a far cry from what many S.B.C. Sunday Schools teach.

In the 1970s, when a group of Houston youths were taught such modern approaches to the Bible at Baptist Baylor University in Waco, Texas, they returned home and reported the information to Paul Pressler, their former Sunday school teacher. Pressler, a state appeals court judge, who is a cum laude Princeton alumnus and former state legislator, subsequently urged fellow conservatives to work toward electing a series of tough S.B.C. presidents. His notion: the conservative presidents would make appointments that would turn around the schools and the huge S.B.C. publishing house. Criswell's associate pastor, Paige Patterson, became Pressler's partner and the road warrior for the cause. They succeeded in getting conservative presidents elected, and boards began tilting rightward.

In 1984, after Stanley was elected to head the S.B.C. for the first time, Honeycutt declared a "holy war" on the Fundamentalists. He was joined by ( President Russell Dilday of the seminary in Fort Worth, who says the Stanley forces are dishonest and use "blatant non-Christian tactics." Among them: tape-recording lectures of seminary teachers to hunt for "heresy."

Political as well as religious issues deeply divide the S.B.C. Stanley was a founder of Moral Majority, the religious-right political lobby. Honeycutt says that this movement violates the Baptist heritage of church-state separation. Another angry moderate, the Rev. James Dunn, runs the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington, sponsored by the S.B.C. and eight smaller denominations. Dunn's job may ultimately be in danger because Dunn's Baptist lobby is at odds with Fundamentalists in the S.B.C., who demand constitutional amendments on school prayer and abortion.

Caught in the middle of the leadership struggles are the congregations, who worship in settings ranging from clapboard country chapels in the Appalachians to the sprawling four-block complex of Criswell's 25,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas. A great number of these ordinary members at the S.B.C. meeting seemed to want to put an end to the internal struggle. Remarked Randy Newsome of Corbin, Va.: "I'm tired of hearing all this name calling. It's time to get on with our business." Al Miller of Chattanooga agreed that 99% of Southern Baptists "just want to put the fighting behind them."

In that spirit, the convention followed up its election of Stanley by voting in Moore as first vice president of the S.B.C. It was a pointed gesture of compromise. Moore's principal rival was Incumbent Zig Ziglar, a layman who has spent the past year assailing "liberal" professors. The Dallas meeting also chose an extraordinary 22-member "peace committee" to hash out internecine differences.

But there was much bickering over right-wing nominees, and Seminary President Dilday remains skeptical of all the postelection handshaking. Pressler and Patterson, says he, "have their own agenda. We know what that agenda is. We have no reason to believe their tactics will change." And if one of their goals is to fire Dilday himself, he says, "the only way I'll leave, is if they drag me out the front door."

FOOTNOTE: *Previous S.B.C. attendance record: 22,872 in 1978.

With reporting by B. Russell Leavitt/Dallas