Political choice. (Presenting the Issue).

Former President Carter has it right. He has announced with obvious regret that he can no longer live within the confines of the Southern Baptist Convention. Within the convention a powerful faction, according to Carter and others, has chosen to make a few isolated biblical passages into a litmus test of orthodoxy. Over the last couple of decades, walls have grown up defining the limits of the Southern Baptist community.

What has happened to Southern Baptists has been equally at work in other religious communities, including the Catholic community. Indeed, often the same isolated biblical passages are invoked. For roughly the same period of time, a determined effort has been mounted to exclude from discussion the concerns about faithful discipleship expressed at the Second Vatican Council. The recent document emanating from the successor of the Inquisitors, Dominus Jesus, is distinguished only by its obvious clumsiness from a library of similar pronouncements that have marked the current papal administration.

How are believers, scholars included, to respond? When I say President Carter had it right, I mean this: What is wrong with Dominus Jesus, Ex corde ecclesiae and other such documents is not a matter of individual items of fact, evidence, or opinion about which we may disagree. What is wrong is rather the walls they have erected between their proponents and the world in which faithful Christians, many Catholics included, choose to live their lives. On a small planet where modern communications have established a global village, Dominus Jesus would systematically cut off dialog with our fellow villagers. Into a context where every imaginable idea is virtually but a mouse click away from the ordinary lay person, Ex corde ecclesiae would bind the expert to the judgment of remote official spokespersons.

Make no mistake about it. While thinking may be solitary, critical thinking is never executed alone. It presupposes a community, relationships. It is always political, carried out in a polis. With whom do we converse? Under what power relationships? These are threshold issues, no matter the subject matter. Political choice is unavoidable in biblical studies and theology.

Understanding this places recent church pronouncements in perspective. These texts are pervasively political in character. Some commentators have described them as "sunset documents," pronouncements designed to frame the succession struggle that comes at the end of this papal administration.

They are that, and more. Autocratic systems breed dissimulation. Subordinates feign agreement. The career-minded censor their own opinions, sometimes to the extent that they stop thinking independently at all. A succession pattern common to autocratic systems such as the Kremlin, is illustrative: after a succession struggle a new leader emerges with opinions no one ever suspected. How is a resilient bureaucracy to respond? If alert, those who cling to power will have prepared a maze of regulations and paper walls to close off the likelihood that the unexpected opinions might prevail. They will stifle potential questioners as far down the ranks as possible. This program is well underway.

The rest of us would do well to follow the lead of people of faith like President Carter. What he and his allies have done over the last decade or so is to create a network that nourishes southern Baptist life. For example, as doctrinaire boards have stripped Southern Baptist seminaries of academic integrity, alternate programs of ministerial education have emerged in independent institutions. Independent services provide an alternate channel for placement of ministers in congregations. Universities have established boards independent of Southern Baptist Convention control. In other words, committed Southern Baptists have created the communal agencies necessary to live out their faith beyond the walls created by fear.

Scholars and every individual committed to an open church have to begin to take steps to assure one another the opportunity to communicate freely, to guarantee access to publication and employment, and to see to it that our resources are used for the programs deserving of our support. How we might do this will take both imagination and determination. Important as the individual is in this effort, individuals must collaborate to be effective. As one small step in this effort, I invite BTB readers to share ideas in a new e-mail list we are establishing. Please check our website for details about how to join our e-mail list.

In the current issue, we see that the networking we propose lies at the origins of our faith community in Networks and Exchanges: Ephesians 4:7-16 and the Community Function of Teachers by Peter W. Gosnell. In Improving Bible Translations: The Example of Sickness and Healing, John J. Pilch once again demonstrates that an accurate text must negotiate between communities and cultures of the original authors and today's readers. In Titus: Epistle of Religious Revitalization, Kenneth D. Tollefson outlines the six-step program of organizing a revitalization movement at work in Titus. Finally, Anna Brawley suggests in Grafted In: Why Christians Are Thinking about a Jewish Biblical Theology, that when two worlds such as those inhabited by contemporary Jews and Christians interact it is naive to expect a simple two-way street.

Whatever street we live on, someone will police the traffic. If we leave the police power in the hands of those who would stop the traffic, we have made a political choice. If we begin to manage the traffic for ourselves, we have made a better-informed political choice.