Baptists and academic freedom.

In his book A Maggot, the English novelist John Fowles presented a compelling story based upon the life of Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers. (1)

Although not a believer in conventional religion and indeed one who considered that organized religion could properly be dispensed with in the contemporary world, Fowles acknowledged the essential place that religion had in times past. At the end of his novel, he wrote:

   Dissent is a universal phenomenon, yet that of Northern Europe and
   America is, I suspect, our most precious legacy to the world. We
   associate it especially with religion, since all new religions begin
   in dissent, that is, in a refusal to believe what those in power
   would have us believe what they would command and oblige us, in all
   ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to media
   manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe. But in essence it is
   an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism, not something that
   was needed once, merely to meet the chance of an earlier society,
   when religious belief was the great metaphor, and would-be
   conforming matrix, for many things outside religion. It is needed
   always and in our own age more than ever before. (2)

In essence, Fowles argued that human beings make progress by means of the mechanism of dissent. Dissent aids the process of understanding. The association of religious dissent and academic freedom is a useful place to begin this article. It gives a perspective on the topic that is immediately and directly related to the historical genesis and the theological genius of the Baptist movement.

Baptists are Dissenters. (When Dissent is used with an initial capital it is in particular referring to the historical English movement associated with the sixteenth century.) They have played a significant part in the emergence of that kind of society that values and prizes the freedom of individuals to think for themselves and not to be slavishly conformed to contemporary worldviews, assumptions, or opinions. Thus, Baptists were not just fellow-travelers but creative agents in the social ferment of which many, in the western world at least, have come to be beneficiaries.

Baptists as Dissenters

Dissent is that frame of mind that insists upon looking at reality in a way that differs from majority opinion, allied with a sense of duty and obligation to pursue that alternative vision, whatever the personal consequences to the dissenter. Not surprisingly, therefore, Dissenters of the nonconformist kind have contributed disproportionately to the development of progressive modern democracies. Yet, it would be a mistake to see Dissent only within the context of modernity. There have always been dissenting minorities within the Church keeping alive a more radical vision of what it means to follow Christ, as the growth of the monastic orders demonstrated once Christianity had achieved political and cultural dominance. Such movements of intense conviction and obedience have a disproportionate power to influence the wider social context. Moreover, Dissent is a witness to something that lies at the heart of original Christianity. Jesus himself was a dissenter.

Primitive Christianity may be seen as a movement of several-fold dissent. It was a dissenting religious movement within Judaism which, whatever it shared with Judaism, set itself at odds both with the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem and with the traditions of rabbinic Judaism that dominated scriptural interpretation. Jesus himself appears to have belonged to a tradition of biblical interpretation rooted in Galilee that made a more direct appeal to the sacred writings than to the Jerusalem-orientated rabbis. This did not fail to bring him into conflict with scholarly opinion as surely as his alternative means of wielding power through suffering distinguished him from the Zealots. (3) Yet, as a movement within Judaism, early Christianity also inevitably shared its character as a politically dissenting movement. Alone within the Roman world, the Jewish loyalty to Yahweh as King set Jews apart from the general willingness to submit to the emperor as a religious as well as a political figure. As those who saw God's kingship focused in the Risen Christ, Christians continued this line and enjoyed a measure of security for as long as they were seen as a Jewish sect. The Jews were regarded as awkward and yet were tolerated as an exceptional case within the empire. Once ejected from rabbinic Judaism, Christians became newly vulnerable to persecution. At this point, the heroic insistence that Jesus, not Caesar, was Lord meant that their conscientious obedience to the truth as they saw it would have painful, if necessary, consequences.

Baptists then should be seen as a dissenting movement within a dissenting movement. Their dissent has consisted of the belief that something of the essence of the faith itself was at stake once the established Church (4) allied itself with a coercive state to enforce a form of religion that was a betrayal of original and authentic Christianity. This might well be seen as a conservative Dissent in that it was not a rejection of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith but an attempt to recover them and live in greater conformity to them. Without directly intending it, Baptists nonetheless opened up the creative possibilities of alternative patterns of social existence that have enormously and beneficially shaped subsequent societies.

If historic Dissent needs to be set within the context of Christianity as a dissenting movement, perhaps a further step is possible. It has been argued that whenever religions detach themselves from the onerous burden of providing legitimating ideologies for states and being responsible for their management, a new age of creative flowering becomes possible for them. (5) An example of this is the displacement of the Jewish state at the time of the exile. This catastrophic event, understood by the Jews as judgment from God precipitating them back into a new Egypt, can be seen as the point at which Judaism as we now recognize it began to flower. During the exile, the Hebrew scriptures began to take canonical form as a product of the profound theological reflection required by the event itself. Synagogue worship also took shape during this period, the Temple having been destroyed. Obedience to the law of God took on a new significance once the offering of Temple sacrifices was, at least for the time being, no longer a possibility. Quite unpredictably at the time, the foundations were laid for the long history of Jewish devotion and worship after the destruction of the Temple in C.E. 70, a devotion focused on law rather than sacrifice.

The argument that religions can fulfill their genius more creatively if church and state are separated can also be detected in discussions about the secular nature of the state. So it is that the nineteenth-century politician Camillo Cavour, advocate and originator of the term "a free church in a free state," argued that a new political arrangement in a united Italy that removed the Vatican from its seat of political power would be to the benefit and renewal of the Church and so to the rest of society. Understood in these terms "secularism" as a political doctrine need not always be the godless specter it is sometimes presented as, and that sometimes it certainly is. (6)

What connections might we make between the Dissenting history of Baptists, and the witness it bears to the essence of Christianity, and the issue with which this article is dealing, namely academic freedom? A number of general framing points are worth making before turning to attitudes within the wider academic world and then to academic freedom within Baptist-related academies and organizations.

The Baptist Hermeneutic of Suspicion

Some might anticipate that Baptists are suspicious of elitist and hegemonic claims to determine how reality should be interpreted. Baptists dissented from a state religion that claimed the right to determine what should be believed and how belief should be practiced. In reality, of course, the state religion recognized that private beliefs were beyond the power of the state to determine, but at least outward conformity was deemed necessary for the good of society. Baptists deemed this demand for conformity illegitimate since it put the state in the place of God, lording it over conscience. Baptists, in their interpretation of scripture, the self-same documents to which the state religion laid claim, saw that there was a disjunction between the religion of the state and that of the New Testament. Baptists exposed state religion as false and so unworthy of conformity.

Although Baptist thought-forms would not have stretched in those pre-Marxist days to defining state religion as "ideology" or to Baptists seeing themselves as applying an "hermeneutic of suspicion," this was, in effect, how they thought and what they were doing. State religion gave legitimacy to a certain way of exercising power. It used Christian theology in a "conjunctive" fashion to affirm the powers-that-be by analogy, asserting, as, for instance did Kings James I and VI, "no bishop, no king." The institution of monarchy was legitimated by the monarchical episcopate that, no doubt, made equal appeal to a monarchian vision of God or Christ. By contrast, Baptist and Dissenting logic was more likely to be "disjunctive." Because, according to that logic, Jesus was King, and all other kings were made relative and reduced. Even kings were subject to a higher kingship.

If the English state and English religion could be so misguided, there is no dominant ideology that could escape the same danger. The truth is, therefore, at least as likely to be found among those who reject majority opinion as among those who embrace it. Majority or state-sponsored opinion on its own is no guarantee of truth. However important the tradition might be, traditionalism is not a viable option. But the same is true for those who regard themselves as having overthrown the tradition. The a-religious, and sometimes anti-religious, ideologies that dominate the western world are as much the product of an elitist hegemony as any religious stance could be.

If this analysis bears some resemblance to the often-mentioned postmodern mistrust of "grand narratives," then let the resemblance stand. History suggests that even when a Christian paradigm becomes the ideology undergirding the power of the state, the form of Christianity advanced tends to become infected with the will to power rather than the search for truth. Contemporary experience even suggests that some strands of Baptist life and thought can be closely allied to powerful political ideologies and that when theology becomes ideology, or the search for theological truth becomes politicized, tragedy lies close at hand. Our Dissenting tradition should warn us against this.

The Baptist Openness to New Insights

Some may also claim with justification that Baptists are open to new insights that may revise or complement traditional understanding. Baptists often assert that, unlike other traditions, they do not believe in creeds. If this were true, it would be sad since the church's Ecumenical Creeds are fully worthy of belief and usage. There is reason to believe that in the strict sense Baptist rejection of creeds is not true at all. Baptists have both affirmed the church's historic creeds and produced many confessions of faith to clarify for themselves and for others their identity and their orthodoxy. Perhaps what is meant by this frequent claim is that Baptists do not believe in the imposition of creeds to enforce orthodoxy. They are wary of the use of creeds and confessions as instruments of power and exclusion, they themselves having suffered the consequences of such usage.

Baptists have certainly wished to hold fast to the scriptures as the primary means through which the truth of God is mediated to the church. With John Robinson, they have believed that their understanding of scripture is neither static nor final but that "the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word." One might even claim that this constitutes the Baptist tradition. The tradition is a dynamic one that calls for constant openness to new insights from the Word of God and therefore for a pilgrim existence, rather than a closed one that simply invites sublime recapitulation.

The paradigm for the Baptist view of scripture must be Baptist insights into baptism and the consequences that the doctrine of baptism has for their understanding of the church. Against a background of hundreds of years of Christendom and a settled theory and practice of infant baptism, Baptists claimed that the true practice of baptism, according to the New Testament, required a radical break and a new beginning. If the church could be called to reform and renew its practice at this central point, then the same call could come at other points and could require a similar obedience. Because the Word of God was free, so our thinking should be free.

The Baptist Concern with Continuity in the Faith

Having asserted these points, one needs also to add that Baptists are concerned with continuity in the faith as much as with the possibility of innovation. The freedom that is integral to a Baptist vision is not unconstrained. It is a freedom under the Word of God and for the Word of God. There is sound epistemology here. Positions can be doubted and questions asked only at the same time as other things are not being doubted and are being assumed. Bishop Lesslie Newbiggin once put it memorably: "It is fine to have an open mind, but not open at both ends at the same time." The dissent that is part of the Baptist story was not questioning everything at the same time--it operated out of conviction. It was both radical and conservative--radical in that it went back to the roots of the faith in the New Testament witness and conservative in that it took this historic witness as normative and primary. Tradition is good in so far as it is a faithful unfolding of the densely packed mystery of the New Testament witness and bad in so far as it deviates from that witness. Church history gives evidence of both kinds of tradition.

Christian doctrine consistently makes distinctions between dogma, doctrine, and opinion. Not all Christian beliefs have the same status. Dogmas are those beliefs that are considered irreversible: if the church were to give them up, it would at the same time abolish itself. Doctrines are in principle capable of revision and reformulation so as to arrive at more adequate formulations. Opinions will vary without the essence of the faith coming under threat. In a crude, but not therefore unhelpful, characterization, for Fundamentalists everything is dogma and for liberals everything is opinion. A differentiated view of Christian doctrine enables a more subtle debate about the status of individual doctrines and about what is at stake in discussing them.

In identifying Baptist approaches to creeds, we argued that the coercive use of creeds lay at the heart of traditional Baptist reticence about them, rather than creeds as such. Baptists, however, have never been indifferent to the importance of continuity, of ensuring that the faith that is now confessed is the same faith to which the apostles bore witness and which has sustained the church down the generations. It remains a challenge to Baptist theological institutions in particular both to ensure continuity of faith without coercion and to sustain the kind of continuity that is open to the "more light and truth" of which we have written.

Baptists and Academic Freedom

Within the frame of these comments, the issue of academic freedom now may be addressed, first in general and then in relation to Baptist theological education. Baptists can hardly help but be in favor of academic freedom on the basis of fundamental instincts shaped by Dissent. The freedom to question, to challenge, and to propose new solutions must be seen as a basic human good. Ideologies that forbid or penalize opinion that goes outside the prescribed party line preferred by powerful elites are unacceptable whatever their inspiration, religious or secular. This rule extends to the more subtle ideologies that find expression in "political correctness" and that attempt to control the language in which conversations take place. No objection is raised here to the undoubted insight that language is inevitably freighted and needs to be used responsibly, simply to attempts by elites to control actual use. However, academic freedom is not an idol to be worshipped. Freedom needs to be exercised responsibly which, in the wider consideration, means with due regard to the well-being first of the human creation and then of the wider environment. The pursuit of knowledge must bear in mind the use to which such knowledge might be put. Baptists, like other Christians, will approach these matters within a worldview that understands willing conformity to the will and purpose of God to be the highest good and will negotiate out from this core.

How does this apply to Baptist institutions such as universities, seminaries, and publishing houses? We need not look far for examples of educational institutions that began as specifically Baptist, confessional initiatives but with the passage of time have become unrecognizable as such. We might come to think that this process of secularization is inevitable and reflects the fact that good things pioneered by the churches are desired by the wider community and beneficial to them. We might also feel entitled to believe that a critical mass of Baptist confessional institutions should maintain continuity even through inevitable change and hold fast, radically, to their point of initial departure. How is it possible to do this while also avoiding theological coercion on the one hand and freedom undetermined by concerns for loyalty and continuity on the other?

An analogy is appropriate here with the Baptist way of being the church. Each local church is a community that gathers around the central reality of Jesus Christ made known through preaching, baptism, communion, and shared convictions concerning who Christ is. Sometimes, such convictions are expressed in confessions and doctrinal statements, at others, by means of more general designations that nonetheless position churches within a tradition of believing. In British Baptist churches, reference is often made to "those doctrines generally designated evangelical." Membership of a church is voluntary and therefore should convictions change membership can change with them, sometimes being transferred elsewhere and sometimes ceasing altogether. Baptist emphasis on the heartfelt nature of belief would encourage such alterations as the alternative to empty nominalism, and in this way a church would maintain its doctrinal integrity. A latitude of interpretation will remain within a confession of faith and a tradition of believing. The distinction between dogma, doctrine, and opinion holds good both in confessing the Christian faith in general and a Baptist identity in particular.

Diverse communities only hold together if they are willing to acknowledge that there are negotiable beliefs as well as non-negotiable ones. For doctrinally serious communities, however, there are certainly points at which changes in belief take people beyond the recognizable boundaries of Christian believing. Equally, there are changes that mean that people might cease to be Baptists even while continuing to be Christians and might no longer choose that identity for themselves. Generally speaking, such shifts and changes happen by personal choice within voluntary communities as people are encouraged to be honest and to have integrity about their convictions. Occasionally, a Baptist church may reluctantly decide that some can no longer be owned as members and so might discontinue their membership. This decision should be seen not as punitive but as a principled and transparent recognition of the true state of affairs.

Applied to confessional Baptist institutions, the voluntary principle leads us to stress that those who participate in them do so as a matter of choice and that in choosing to do so they commit themselves at the least to uphold the ethos and mission of that institution. Institutions have no obligation to employ those who are bent upon subversion. Mature institutions will understand that within a particular framework of faithful believing there are nonetheless advantages to not over-determining the content of belief but to allowing latitude of interpretation within dogmatic boundaries. Along with other evangelicals, some Baptists, lacking a central teaching office or magisterium, have tended to maintain their theological identity by establishing commitment to doctrines such as biblical inerrancy, penal substitution, and eternal conscious torment in hell for the impenitent as signs of allegiance to the evangelical cause. A preferable approach would be to guard the center of evangelical conviction rather than to police the boundaries.

Commitment to academic freedom implies a "pilgrim" rather than a "settler" approach to the theological endeavor. Where beliefs change radically and overflow the appropriate dogmatic boundaries, the first recourse should be to the individual's own sense of integrity and conscience. Self-regulation is always the best regulation. Experience suggests, however, that this is precisely the contested point: what some perceive as a breach of basic conviction, others see as a legitimate elaboration and a more faithful presentation of core beliefs. At this point, there is no alternative to a (sometimes painful) willingness, on the one hand, to allow extended discussion and exploration lest it be the case that more light and truth are about to break forth and, on another hand, the willingness to pronounce that what is advanced in the name of academic freedom is actually no longer continuous with the "faith once delivered to the saints." If it were possible to find a formula to resolve such tensions, it would be convenient; but all responsible souls know that this is not on offer.

To illustrate this tension from within contemporary discussions, the "openness of God" position (7) would seem to me to belong to the former category. The validity or non-validity of this position will no doubt become clearer as time passes and judgments mature, but the intent behind it seems, to me, to be to get closer to the God revealed in Christ by listening attentively to the sources of our faith and to be in continuity with biblical witness. By contrast, non-realist voices wishing to hold on to a humanistic form of Christianity while equally asserting that none of it is actually true and that God is a merely human construct (8) plainly have gone beyond it. For Christian institutions to disavow such positions is not ultimately to compromise the academic freedom of those who advocate them since they can go on saying what they want elsewhere in a free society. It is simply an exercise of their own academic freedom as confessional institutions.

(1.) J. R. Fowles, A Maggot (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1986). Fowles used the word "maggot" in the obsolete sense of a whim or a quirk. By derivation, the use of the term in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to dance-tunes or airs that had no special title.

(2.) Ibid., 459.

(3.) See John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

(4.) When Church is used with an initial capital, it is a reference to the church as institutionally established in the West.

(5.) H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958).

(6.) Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. "Secularism."

(7.) See as a Baptist example Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001).

(8.) Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith: Christianity in change (London: BBC, 1984); Anthony Freeman, God in Us: A Case for Christian Humanism (London: SCM Press, 1993).

Nigel G. Wright is principal at Spurgeon's College, London, England.