Baptists and Evangelicals: What’s the Difference?
By Don Kirkland
Southern Baptists are suffering from an identity crisis, a church historian told the South Carolina Baptist Historical Society.
E. Glenn Hinson, professor [at that time]1 of church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said it is "absolutely critical" for Baptists to learn who they are if they wish to hold onto their heritage.
His address, "Baptists and Evangelicals–What is the Difference?" delineated the historic differences between the two groups.
Hinson said the two groups are committed to the Scriptures and possess a feel for evangelical conversion. "But make no mistake about it, we come from different wombs."
"[Today’s] Evangelicals," he continued, "are the descendants of the late 16th and early 17th century Protestant scholastics. They are children of English and American millenialists and fundamentalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
"As such," he emphasized, "they let nothing stand above what they consider the objective word of God found in the Scriptures."
He pointed out that "Baptists, by contrast, are the descendants of persecuted and harassed dissenters of the 17th century who came forth from the womb crying for liberty."
"They are children," he added, "of the refugees who fled from the European continent to these shores to found here a society in which there would be no restriction of conscience and no religious test for public office. As such, they have insisted that faith must be free and voluntary if it is to be genuine faith, that there is no objective word apart from uncoerced human response."
The Southern Baptist historian said, "that version of Christianity which places the priority on voluntary and uncoerced faith or response to the Word, and act of God," is a distinctive of Baptists.
Unlike evangelicals, Baptists "have not put a lot of stock in creedal statements," Hinson noted. Instead, he said Baptists have "frequently repudiated the creeds as human contrivances and consistently insist on the Scriptures alone as their sole rule of faith and practice."
Hinson said that while evangelicals were developing a passion to be biblical, and aiming for precision in theology, Baptists were becoming suspicious of orthodoxy, more prone to dissent and nonconformity.
"No two religious movements could have differed more from one another at this juncture than these–the Baptists and the evangelicals," he said.
Hinson said the real identity crisis is a product of the 20th century, caused partly by the "overt organized effort of some to spread evangelicalism." This effort, he said, was coordinated by the Bible institutes which "allowed the fundamentalists to break away from denominational ties without cutting themselves off from some base of operation."
"Southern Baptists should be quite conscious of the continuation of this same pattern," he said, identifying Criswell Center for Biblical Studies, Luther Rice Seminary, and Mid-America Seminary as "headquarters for the effort to disseminate fundamentalism and eventually to take control of the Southern Baptist Convention."2
Hinson said inerrancy of infallibility of the Bible is not the real issue in today’s controversy among Southern Baptists. "The real issue," he said, "is whether pastors of a few jumbo-sized churches can establish themselves as inerrant and infallible teachers and thus qualify for the kind of authority they want to exercise in the Southern Baptist Convention."
Their argument, he said, is this: "You can’t argue with our success. If you follow the other model or models, you won’t have this kind of success."
The Southern Seminary professor said the difference boils down to "an entirely different attitude toward human response to the word of God."
"Nothing handled by human beings can have such an objective character that we fallible human beings can presume to impose it upon others," he said. "To be valid, our response must be voluntary. The word itself will win us but it will never coerce."
Hinson concluded his address to the historical society by wondering whether "we no longer want to be Baptists," denying liberty to the individual and substituting the authoritarian church model for the democratic one.
Some have decided they do not want to be Baptists, Hinson said, and then added: "Do not number me among them."3
1 Don Kirkland was assistant editor of the Baptist Courier, journal of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, when the article was originally published. This article is reprinted from a 1981 article in The Religious Herald, journal of the Baptist General Association of Virginia.
Dr. Hinson later moved to the chair of church history at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, from which he retired. In retirement he teaches at Lexington (KY) Theological Seminary, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, and Kentucky Baptist Seminary (Lexington). He is member of the adjunct faculty of the Academy for Spiritual Formation. He is a widely published author in New Testament, patristics, ecclesiology, spirituality, liturgy, and Baptist history.
2 Among American Baptists (ABC), Dr. Hinson reiterated the thesis offered in this article during a meeting at the ABC 1993 Biennial at San Jose, called in response to the formation of a takeover movement ("American Baptist Evangelicals") within the ABC, later at a retreat of Wisconsin ABC Clergy in 1997, and elsewhere.
3 As Jim Gilliam notes, "The [SBC] takeover was finally complete in 2000 when Jerry Falwell joined the [Southern Baptist] Convention and Jimmy Carter renounced it." The takeover movement dates from a 1976 meeting between Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler in which they began work on their long term strategy to take over the SBC. Pressler later characterizes this as a "need to go for the jugular" [of the SBC]. This takeover was deemed effectively complete in June 1999 at the SBC meeting.
