What is a Baptist? Bible Freedom
Over the last few years I’ve done some thinking as to why I am a Baptist and as to why I choose to stay a member of the Baptist church. After all, the Baptist denomination is not always the easiest one for a woman in ministry, and we’re not without our checkered past and drama. Sometimes it does feel like it might be less embarrassing to be a Lutheran or a Presbyterian - they seem not to find themselves in the news as much as we do.
But I’ve been attending Baptist churches for as long as I can remember and, while I’m sure it doesn’t matter to Jesus which denomination we claim, being a Baptist is something that I am proud of - it’s a choice I would make again, if I needed to. I am not a Baptist by accident, but fully on purpose.
Why? Why claim this hot-mess group of people who seem to bicker about everything on God’s good earth? Why stick up for a denomination with a history of defending slavery and stifling women and sometimes getting in too deep with politics and political figures? It is undeniable that the Baptist church has gotten it wrong plenty of times…
But the core beliefs of Baptists - what truly makes a Baptist a Baptist - are things with which I am wholly on-board. These distinctive beliefs are commonly referred to as “The Four Fragile Freedoms.” Over the next four weeks, I’m going to talk about these Freedoms and what they mean to me.
Today we’ll start with the first one: Bible Freedom. This is the belief that all Christians are free to study Scripture for themselves.
This almost certainly stems from antiquity, when the Catholic church in Europe made it so that the only Bibles available belonged to priests and church leaders. And, lets face it, even if Bibles had been made available to individual congregants, not many of them would have been able to read them anyway as they were written in Latin.
We can see, today, why it might be problematic for our only understanding of Scripture to come from one human source in whose best interest it was to keep people believing certain things about his own power and authority. We can see how easily that might lead to corruption.
And so, as Baptists, we affirm that all Christians are free to read and study Scripture for themselves. For us, the Bible is not something filled with the one and only ever static truth, a truth that we can riddle out and then pass down to future generations without question, but something that is alive and challenges us to come back, time and time again, to interpret with a fresh heart under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This freedom of interpretation is something that I think we, as Baptists, have gotten right.
“Freedom of interpretation comes with the responsibility to use the brains that God gave us to study, think critically, and ask hard questions. It comes with a calling to remain flexible in the way the Holy Spirit is guiding our interpretation.”
However, some in the past have criticized Baptists for being too independent (and they’ve got a point, haven’t they?). There are those who think that this Freedom of interpretation can lead to a bazillion bad interpretations floating around and I suppose that is a valid concern. That is why it is important that we tether our interpretation to Christ. If you interpret scripture in a way that runs contrary to the example set by Christ, then I think it’s safe to say that you’ve missed the mark a bit. It’s also always a good idea to discuss Scripture with other believers in community - not so that they can interpret the Bible for you, but so that you are not interpreting Scripture in an echo chamber of your own thoughts and presuppositions.
Baptists are also what you’d call non-creedal people, meaning we have no set of beliefs that one must follow in order to be Baptists - we figure that we are free to interpret Scripture and therefore don’t need creeds. No one is allowed to tell you what you have to believe about the Bible or how you must interpret it.
One cannot miss the irony of the great inerrancy debate that came from the Southern Baptist Convention in the 80s - when a large ruling group of Baptists sought to determine for all Baptists that the Bible must, more or less, be read and understood literally. In this case, our distinctive belief in Bible freedom kicked right in to question that authority.
Bible freedom is the first of our four fragile freedoms, and like all freedoms, it’s one that comes with responsibility. Freedom of interpretation comes with the responsibility to use the brains that God gave us to study, think critically, and ask hard questions. It comes with a calling to remain flexible in the way the Holy Spirit is guiding our interpretation. After all, a lot rides on how we interpret Scripture - how we interpret is how we teach our kids, how we determine how to treat our neighbors, and how we essentially represent Christ on earth.
