The late Baptist theologian James McClendon starts off his three-volume systematic theology with a question: why don’t Baptists write systematic theology?
Now, that’s hyperbolic, of course. John Gill’s works were important and influential (for better or worse) among the English-speaking reformed of various denominations. E.Y. Mullins and Walter Rauschenbusch both produced deeply influential systematic treatments of Christian theology. Clark Pinnock and Stanley Grenz both produced important theological works during McClendon’s time, and of course, let’s just do our best to ignore a certain Grudem-shaped elephant in this particular room.
But the point stands, though. Compared to most other Protestant denominations, Baptists have produced an amount of notable theological work that is disproportionately low to their size. Why?
McClendon brings up and then hand-waves away what I think is essentially the correct answer: historical and material realities. Early Baptists faced severe persecution and lacked access to the type of institutional resources that allow a body of Christians to produce widely influential work:
These communities have been preoccupied with the harsh struggle to survive and have not had the leisure for theological reflection. The Reformation baptists, for example, were literally driven out of most of Europe including Britain. Most of their leaders were soon dead; their literary production was sharply limited to instruction to the faithful, to polemic and apologetic confessions, and (significantly enough) to historical narratives.
This, again, is McClendon’s summary of a view he mostly disagrees with. To summarize, other groups under similar persecution have produced more robust theology (I wish he would cite a source here), and Baptists in America and the UK have long been socially empowered without significant change in output (this is mostly true, but discounts the knock-on effects of so many years of social disempowerment; what would Anglicanism look like today if Thomas Cranmer’s writing output had been severely hampered and repressed?).
The real reason that Baptists have produced so little theology, says McClendon, is that they have mostly “failed to see their own heritage, their own way of using Scripture, their own communal practices, their own guiding vision, [as] a resource for theology” (26). Given that Baptists are populist in ethos and developed independently of formal institutional support or guidance, writes McClendon, they have historically been especially susceptible to “the prevailing tendencies round about them” and “the victim of ideologies left and right” (Ibid).*
This discussion about Baptists’ relationship to theological writing can extend to our question about Baptists and catechism. Very few Baptist catechisms exist, and they aren’t really “baptist” in any distinct sense other than restricting baptism to professing believers. Most Baptists catechisms are reprints or modifications of the 1693 Keach’s Catechism, which itself is mostly a reworking of the Westminster Catechism. Here again, we see McClendon’s complaint: Keach’s Catechism is not uniquely *Baptist,* but a tacking-on of one important Baptist belief to a pre-existing work.
I said in my last post that I wanted to try and write a catechism for Baptists. Doing this is going to mean writing a *Baptist* catechism, one that reflects on and emerges out of our heritage, unique way of using Scripture, communal practices, and guiding vision, as McClendon stated. After all, McClendon did not suggest that Baptists lacked these things, but that most Baptists had failed to recognize them—there is a uniquely Baptist version of all of these things, and the Body of Christ will be better for our recognizing it and bringing it to the eccumenical table.
Now, what a distinctly Baptist theological method looks like is a bigger question. While I’m critical of some of the ways that McClendon contextualizes Baptist history, I think he’s very good on this question. Next week (or the week after, I haven’t quite decided a schedule), I’ll write a follow-up to this, outlining what McClendon claims are the distinctive and defining characteristics of Baptist theology, along with some of my own thoughts.
*As a quick aside, I don’t think McClendon means “left and right” as in “political ideologies,” but rather idiomatically for “the ideologies all around them.” McClendon was fairly politically radical, having lost his job at Golden Gate Theological Seminary over his civil rights activism, and later losing another teaching position over his protests against the Vietnam War. Whatever McClendon might have in mind about ideologies “capturing” Baptists, I doubt he was advocating for a political centrism.
Page numbers refer to the 2012 Baylor University Press reprint of McClendon’s Systematic Theology. All quotes in this post come from volume 1, Ethics.
This is so good to read. I grew up Baptist and love much about what I see as my Baptist heritage. The last decade or so, though, seems to have flattened it in the Baptist churches around me as they have become increasingly general evangelical churches.
I also find it funny I didn’t recognize any of the names you mentioned, except one *cough* though I went to a Baptist university. Of course, they’d dropped the Baptist History course requirement by then.