Against Returning to Egypt: Exposing and Resisting Creedalism in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Likely, few Southern Baptists are acquainted with a doctrinal statement adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention at its annual meeting in 1994 known as the "Report of the Presidential Theological Study Committee." A small committee of denominational leaders appointed by then SBC President H. Edwin Young examined doctrines held and taught by Baptists. They then offered the report to the SBC, which, in its 1994 annual meeting commended the report to Southern Baptist agencies and institutions as a guide to help Southern Baptists move toward a new denominational consensus.

Self-proclaimed Baptist freedom fighter Jeff Pool, in his critical examination of the document, claims that the RPTSC and its adoption by the SBC represents the most serious theological threat to the denomination in its entire history. Utilizing Scripture, logic, and the historical record, Pool supports his guiding hypothesis with ample evidence. Pool bluntly states that his aim is to expose and resist the report because it is covertly Calvinistic; credalistic; and because it is a tool to enhance the power of the fundamentalist SBC political structure that has already begun to enforce conformity to the document.

The book is organized in two parts with a prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, Pool discusses the distinguishing characteristics of creeds and confessions noting that creedalism is a threat to Baptists who have a confessional heritage. For Southern Baptists to embrace creedalism would be analogous to the children of Israel returning to enslavement in Egypt. In part one, Pool examines the rationale of and for the RPTSC. He concludes that the document is based on questionable assumptions, employs deceptive rhetoric, and was formulated by a "self-appointed and self-perpetuating group of elite leaders" (p. 38).

In the second division, Pool studies the report's doctrinal formulations and finds them reductive and distorted. For example, Pool criticizes the document for its neglect of pneumatological concerns, its ahistorical soteriology, and its Calvinistic hamartiology. Most provocative is Pool's discussion of the internal inconsistencies of the penal-substitionary atonement--the atonement theory the report affirms as the only legitimate interpretation of God's effort to save humankind despite past SBC confessional statements' avoidance of that particular soteriology. Pool's epilogue suggests how Southern Baptists can resist distorted creedalism.

A scholarly work, replete with content footnotes that are worth exploring, Against Returning to Egypt is not a casual weekend read. Rather, readers, especially the theologically uncultivated, should ingest small daily portions of the work, allowing time to ruminate. A number of Baptists may think that the author wrote too much about something quite insignificant. Yet, this book addresses more than a single SBC document. It is one attempt to help preserve a distinctive Baptist identity in the face of threats to eradicate that identity. Although this work is controversial, it is, above all, an invitation for all Southern Baptists to dialogue about their theology in a spirit of mutual trust instead of seeking to coerce one another into accepting an artificial, inauthentic, spurious theological consensus.--Reviewed by Jerry Faught, Instructor in Religion, Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee, Oklahoma.