Being Baptist

This essay examines the shape of a constitutive Baptist rhetoric in order to dis-cover ways Baptist identity functions as a source of rhetorical invention. A Matrixof Contemporary Christian Voices is employed to array differences amongBaptists in their expression of denominational identity and to discover limits asto what it means to think like a Baptist.

W illiam H. Willimon, a Methodist professor of Christian ministry anddean of Duke University Chapel, recently began a homily on the diffi-

culty of pastoral ministry with a double reference to the contentious nature ofBaptists. He writes, “In punishment for my sins, my HMO assigned me to afundamentalist Baptist doctor who subjects me to theological conversationwhile he examines me. During the poking and prodding he’ll say, for example,‘I don’t know how you preachers do it—the politics, the congregational com-plaining, the expectations of people. I take my hat off to you pastors.’”Willimon comments on the comical image of the doctor’s ruminations, whilehe is no position to respond, in order to raise the question of who really hasthe more demeaning job. “Still,” Willimon adds, “the doctor had a point. Thepastoral ministry is a tough vocation. Something like 300 Southern Baptistpastors are fired every month.”1 Baptists have always been known for the kindof squabbling revealed in these numbers. The willingness to argue may be asintrinsic to the Baptist identity as its embrace of pietism, its valuing ofChristian experience, and its commitment to soul freedom.2

As one who has been a Baptist pastor and now works as an educator, I havelong since made my public peace with “being Baptist.” This identity is somehowcore to who I have become, not only as a person of faith, but as a rhetoricianand an educator. I do not promise that I will always worship God with fellowBaptists—we can be such a contentious lot—but I could no more deny that

BEING BAPTISTROBERT STEPHEN REID

Robert Stephen Reid is Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the Department ofCommunication at the University of Dubuque in Dubuque, Iowa.

© Rhetoric & Public AffairsVol. 7, No. 4, 2004, pp. 587-602ISSN 1094-8392

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who I am has been shaped by Baptist ways of thought than Terry Eagletonwould wish to deny his Marxist intellectual commitment or Judith Fetterleywould wish to deny being a feminist. I am pleased to join with colleagues inthese pages to reflect on the influence of our various denominational rhetoricsas a source of intellectual invention. In what follows I provide a personal sketchof becoming and being Baptist and explore the central communicative assump-tions of a constitutive Baptist rhetoric in order to describe for non-Baptists theoften inchoate impulses that shape what it may mean to think like a Baptist.

BECOMING BAPTIST

In the summer of my eighteenth year, while attending a Baptist revival meeting,I responded to the Christian witness that “in Christ God was reconciling theworld to himself.”3 I was baptized upon my confession of faith and became amember of a Landmark Missionary Baptist congregation. I remained a funda-mentalist Baptist for the next seven years, through Vietnam-era military serviceand throughout my years of college at California State University at Fullerton. Ireceived significant gifts from my relationship with fundamentalist Christianity,not the least of which was a deep commitment to faith in God and a love forstudying scripture as text. From the beginning I was encouraged to question howculture, metaphor, genre, and the history of various explanations of the mean-ing of this book of texts had come to shape its interpretation. For me, becomingBaptist meant I was given freedom to encounter the Bible as text and to try todetermine its meaning(s) without being forced to accept someone else’s pre-scribed interpretation. Nothing in my university experience could begin to com-pare to this rich engagement with text. However, the critical thinking skills of myeducation had already led me to question the assumptions of fundamentalism’stheological worldview. My decision to attend Fuller Theological Seminary facil-itated a journey away from fundamentalism; the seminary serves evangelical andmainline Protestant Christianity. After graduating from seminary I was ordainedas a professional church leader among the American Baptist Churches.

During the next decade, I served as pastor of two Baptist congregations andas a long-term interim pastor for three additional congregations. The interimpastorates occurred while I pursued the M.A. and Ph.D. in rhetoric at theUniversity of Washington. As Baptist clergy in all of these parishes my foremosttask was to preach a “Word of God,” by which Baptist congregations mean anoral engagement with the meaning of the ancient text in such a way that thisWord “once delivered to the saints [of old]” is recontextualized to speak to anew generation of Christians.4 Where many traditions are willing to grant apastor the authority to preach based on such external ethos as recognition ofprofessional preparation, appointed positions, or the symbolic auctoritas of

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clerical vestments, authority is granted to Baptist preachers based on a singlestandard of internal ethos—the congregation’s perception that the preacher canhandle the message of the Bible faithfully in preaching.5

BEING BAPTIST

The Sacramental, Lutheran, Reformed, Mennonite, and Wesleyan/Holinesstheological traditions each have adopted a Book of Order and a Statement ofFaith to provide adherents with a confessional identity that serves as a set of“rails” over which a parishioner’s journey of spiritual formation can be tra-versed. Not so with Baptists. On the face of it Lumpkin’s collection of BaptistConfessions of Faith would seem to suggest this similarity with other ecclesialtraditions. However, Lumpkin observes that Baptist confessions have alwaysserved as “manifestos of prevailing doctrine in particular groups” rather thanas documents defining a locus of a denominational identity.6 Baptists areinnately suspicious of creeds. In Baptists and Liberty of Conscience, written in1884, American Baptist historian Henry Vedder wrote, “It is the glory ofBaptists that they were the first to advocate religious liberty for all men. . . .The corollary of this doctrine was the rejection of all human authority and theassertion of the right of every man to interpret the Scriptures for himself, asenlightened by the Spirit of God.”7

When non-Baptists comment on the Baptist identity they generally drawattention to its emphasis on religious experience, its concern about mode ofbaptism, and its conception of congregational autonomy.8 A prominentLutheran historian, Martin E. Marty, argues that the Baptist commitment tothe principle of “liberty of conscience” has been transformed through theAmerican colonial experience into an epochal effect in American religion—something he describes as the Baptistification of even the most creedalAmerican denominations.9 Since Marty first described the immensity ofBaptist influence in American religion, his term Baptistification has become theword to describe the democratizing impetus whenever lay people challengetheir leadership in a confessional tradition. One need only think of the new-found voice of American Catholic laity in claiming their right to challenge theChurch’s handling of the sexual abuse scandal. Its expression is also readilyapparent in the contemporary religious phenomenon of “shopping for faith,” asif religious identity should be a consumer choice.10 This Baptistification impe-tus of claiming soul freedom regardless of one’s denomination is thoroughlyand historically baptistic if not fully Baptist.

Baptist men and women in America have always been advocates of libertyof conscience. Walter B. Shurden continues this tradition in The BaptistIdentity: Four Fragile Freedoms by gathering convictions historically expressed

BEING BAPTIST 589


in Baptist sermons, addresses, and confessions of faith. He frames these in thefamiliar terms as a set of “Baptist distinctives,” reframing liberty of conscienceas soul freedom and then connecting each of the other distinctives to this oneessential commitment to freedom:

BIBLE FREEDOM is the historic Baptist affirmation that the Bible, under the

Lordship of Christ, must be central in the life of the individual and church and

that Christians, with the best and most scholarly tools of inquiry, are both free

and obligated to study and obey Scripture.

SOUL FREEDOM is the historic affirmation of the inalienable right and

responsibility of every person to deal with God without the imposition of creed,

the interference of clergy, or the intervention of civil government.

CHURCH FREEDOM is the historic Baptist affirmation that local churches

are free, under the Lordship of Christ, to determine their membership and lead-

ership, to order their worship and work, to ordain whomever they perceive as

gifted for ministry, male or female, and to participate in the larger Body of

Christ, of whose unity and mission Baptists are proudly a part.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM is the historic Baptist affirmation of freedom OF

religion, freedom FOR religion, and freedom FROM religion, insisting that

Caesar is not Christ and Christ is not Caesar.11

Shurden’s effort exemplifies one of the great strengths of Baptist rhetoric—its ability to constantly reform itself by reframing its internal and externaldebates with reference to a constitutive identity grounded in the Baptist beliefof liberty of conscience as soul freedom.12 The contingent nature of these con-victions is evident in Shurden’s concern for their fragility. This is an identityclearly framed in opposition to current Southern Baptist Church leadership,re-privileging freedom over a presumptive tyranny of perceived creedal con-formity and a perceived rhetoric of exploitative demagoguery.13 A close read-ing of these “distinctives” reveals that they are far more inclusive than theSouthern Baptist alternative, but Shurden’s rhetorical strategy is also signifi-cant; he adopts the historically resonant genre of formulating beliefs as a set of“Baptist Distinctives.” The doctrinal formulation just feels Baptist by virtue ofthe genre. Yet, to frame one’s identity by virtue of a focus on distinctiveness isstill an example of what anthropologist Nicholas Thomas calls “discourseagainst another that has an oppositional or argumentative character.”14

Baptists came into being as an opposition movement in the colonial eraand like most other American denominations it continues to exist as a kind of“frozen controversy.” In fact, the statistics cited by Willimon remind observersthat this identity-in-opposition is so indelibly stamped in the Baptist ecclesialcharacter that its denominational wrangling and schism regularly become a



self-consuming rhetoric. In this sense, a tendency to focus on one’s distinc-tiveness can become, in Thomas’s words, “a fetishization of alterity easily reca-pitulate[ing] an us/them disjunction which has in fact long been fissured andcut across by migration and transactions in both directions.”15 The constantdanger of being Baptist is to so institutionalize the radical extension of soulfreedom that it becomes freedom from the responsibility of responding to anyimpositions stipulated by another.16

Social movement critic Rhys H. Williams argues that denominations pro-vide adherents with a symbolic language that can simultaneously preserve astatus quo while they also provide participants with a language and a perspec-tive that can be used to demand social reform.17 At their best, denominationsserve as bearers of a proud heritage of religious belief and as the culturalrepository of signifying rituals and traditions of practice. At their worst, theyserve as enclaves of cultural resistance and as carriers of exclusivist privilegefreighted with religious assumptions of moral superiority. Everett Goodwin,editor of Baptists in the Balance, writes, “Baptists are . . . defined by their free-dom. Because of that, defining appropriate responsibility by which they canlive and work together has been and is their greatest challenge.”18

In viewing Baptists through the lens of social movement theory, I wouldsuggest that a Baptist unity of identity arises from its historic rejection ofoutside authority, that the notion of Baptist commonality is deeply rooted inits tradition of dissent from the normalizing effect of confessional consen-sus, that Baptists find radical extension of choice preferable to the structureof tradition, and that Baptists may indirectly prefer the chaos of re-genesisto the synthetic order that finds its identity by continually reinstituting onefixed moment of genesis.19 In this sense, the Baptist institutionalization ofopposition as distinction from the “other” and the Baptist tendency, in thename of soul freedom, to make persuasive appeals directed to persons as indi-viduals function as sources of invention in Baptist expression and thought.They identify a constitutive Baptist rhetoric readily discernible with preach-ers as diverse as Harry Emerson Fosdick, Martin Luther King Jr., BillyGraham, Carlyle Marney, Paul Ngano, Gardner C. Taylor, Nancy HastingsSehested, and Jerry Falwell. The same sensibility is equally discernable in thepublic expression of Baptist leaders as diverse as Carl F. Henry, Will D.Campbell, Tony Campolo, Jimmy Carter, James McClendon, James M. Dunn,Nancy Ammerman, Timothy Tseng, Paige Patterson, and Molly T. Marshall.

BAPTIST SOURCES OF INVENTION

Baptists believe in the importance of inviting others to accept the transfor-mative possibilities of new life in Christ. Baptist worship is characterized by

BEING BAPTIST 591


a culturally adaptive rather than a formal, tradition-centered liturgy. Baptistworship gives prominence of place to preaching and to appeals that seek topersuade listeners to act on the possibilities of new life in Christ (whetherthrough pietism’s graces or through social action). In all of this Baptists gen-erally have expressed an unquestioned commitment to the role of persuasionin effecting an individual’s commitment to faith. If the chief end of Christianlife is to give glory to God, most Baptists would likely agree that persuadingothers “to confess Jesus Christ as Lord” is one of the most important ways togive glory to God.20 Where the eminent Catholic theologian John HenryNewman maintained that preaching’s purpose was to achieve the end of“some definite spiritual good to those who hear,”21 his equally eloquentBaptist counterpart, C. H. Spurgeon, devoted an entire chapter of Lectures toMy Students to argue that the conversion of listeners through persuasion ispreaching’s end;22 that a minister’s effort to glorify God is “mainly achievedby the winning of souls.”23 Whether accomplished through crass “soul-win-ning” techniques24 or psychologically sensitive “confessional preaching,”25

persuading others to consider the possibility of transformative changeappears to be constitutive of the Baptist voice.

When John A. Broadus penned the most famous homiletics textbook everwritten, he contended that preaching, like all public speaking, “should be largelycomposed of argument.”26 This Baptist theologian was appalled that too muchof the preaching he observed in 1870 was but mere assertion, exhortation, andcareless argument. So he applied Whatley’s Elements of Rhetoric specifically tohomiletics as “the adaptation of rhetoric to the particular ends and demands ofChristian preaching.”27 According to Broadus, arguments are offered in ser-mons to sustain a preacher’s judgment, establish truth, and justify a persuasiveapplication of that truth.28 He wrote, “The chief part of what we commonly callapplication is persuasion. It is not enough to convince men of the truth, norenough to make them see how it applies to themselves, and how it might bepracticable for them to act out, —but we must ‘persuade men.’”29 For manyBaptists, this thoroughly rhetorical homiletic, already caught up in the contin-uation of Scottish Common Sense Realism, eventually led practitioners to treatargument as an end rather than a means. Instead of sermons being controlledby issues of facts-in-dispute, sermons began to be controlled by facts-in-search-of-a-dispute.30 Baptist preachers who desired listeners to render a verdict ontheir sermon, “Yes! This is what we believe,” often found that an identity origi-nally forged in opposition could be regalvanized if sermons identified new adver-saries. They might be hedonists, secularists, liberals, or any group that could bedepicted as disrupting Baptist social solidarity as envisioned by the preacher.

In general Baptist preachers and parishioners are still most at home witheither a facts-in-dispute view of the sermon as argument or a call-to-action



view of the sermon as a reasoned invitation to take “gospel medicine” as pre-scribed by a preacher. These approaches to preaching assume a persuasivelydeterminate/objectivist voice and generally operate with an implicit corre-spondence theory of the relationship between language and reality. They canbe contrasted with approaches to preaching that tend to assume an interpre-tivist view of the nature of truth and make appeals in a persuasively indeter-minate/subjectivist voice.31 The latter approaches to preaching are morecollaborative rather than argumentative, inviting listeners to join with aspeaker in subjectively arriving at understanding.

If this objectivist-subjectivist tension is viewed as one axis dividing con-temporary approaches to preaching, a second axis equally relevant for Baptistspreachers and parishioners is the tension between order and transformation.32

Preachers concerned with sacred order tend to make their appeals with refer-ence to corporate truth drawing on systems of doctrinal agreement or on tra-ditions of confessional identity. Preachers concerned with spiritualtransformation tend to make their appeals by way of reflective analysis andperceptive insight that invite an appropriation of personal truth.33 Baptistsexperience this as the classic tension between appeals grounded in individualliberty vs. appeals grounded in corporate accountability. The following Matrixof Contemporary Christian Voices arrays the basis of persuasive appeals ofcontemporary Christian rhetoric as a negotiation of the tensions between theNature of Language and the Nature of Authority.34

FIGURE 1. MATRIX OF CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN VOICES

BEING BAPTIST 593

The Testifying Voice

Expects: “Yes! This

conversation matters. Let’s

keep talking.”

Formation-Centered

The Teaching Voice

Expects: “Yes! This is what

we believe.”

Argument-Centered

The Sage Voice

Expects: “Whoa! What

will I do with/make of

that?”

Journey-Centered

The Encouraging Voice

Expects: “Lord, may this be

so in my life.”

Advocacy-Centered

Corporate Truth Personal Truth

PersuasivelyDeterminate

PersuasivelyIndeterminate

The

Nat

ure

of

Lan

guag

e A

ppea

ls

The Nature of Authority Appeals


My use of the term voice in this matrix implies an identity—who is speaking—as well as the identity of the group that this notion of voice constructs as itsimplied listeners—who is responding. In this sense voice is identified by theresponse its intention calls forth. A preacher whose intention is to explainmeaning adopts a Teaching Voice to argue for a position. A preacher whoseintention is to facilitate an encounter with the holy adopts an EncouragingVoice with solutions directed toward listeners’ felt needs. A preacher whoseintention is to create an event of meaning in which listeners can explore insightadopts the voice of a knowing Sage who can guide listeners on a journey ofself-awareness. A preacher whose intention is to explore confessional identityin ways that permit listeners to come to terms with who they are in Christ willlikely Testify with the voice of the church in contrast to the voice of secular cul-ture. In each case voice identifies a constitutive rhetoric of faith consciousnessfor both preacher and parishioner.35

I have explored these four voices in preaching theory and practice else-where.36 In this context, I think the matrix is particularly useful in clarifyingwhy Baptists can be so attracted to the sacred order of the Teaching Voice, yetunlikely to avail themselves of the tendency to seek the same sacred order inthe Testifying Voice. The historic commitment to persuasion as the purpose ofpreaching and speaking draws many Baptists to the ordering of the sacred inthe Teaching Voice. Baptists have often been attracted to the possibility of per-suading listeners concerning a particular formulation of Christian “truth,” butthey have historically resisted the idea that ordered sacred confessions of faithshould be considered denominationally binding as “authentic and reliable”summaries of scriptural truth meant to “instruct” denominational identity.37

It is the assumption of an “instructed” identity, rather than the need to per-suade listeners of its truth, that serves as the primary rhetorical resource of theTestifying Voice. Baptists have often been willing to argue the facts, or the truthof a proposition, but it is the argument for truth rather than the reminder ofa corporate identity they find attractive.

A second reason that Baptists would be unlikely to avail themselves of theTestifying Voice is the Baptist predilection for persuasion.38 Where theTeaching Voice assumes that the purpose of preaching is to persuade throughargument, the Testifying Voice is the least overtly persuasive of the voices. TheTestifying Voice enacts a presumption that the purpose of preaching is to col-laboratively engage the corporate community’s traditions, its confessional for-mulations, its divergent perspectives, and its gospel commitments in ways thata Word of God can be released to do a work of spiritual formation in the livesof congregants. Thus, Baptists committed to the objectivist presuppositions ofan argument/advocacy approach to preaching are unlikely to feel at home withthe interpretivist assumptions of preaching in the Sage and the Testifying



voices. On the other hand, Baptists for whom “soul freedom” is a stronger tra-dition of identity are less likely to be concerned with the objectivist-subjec-tivist tension and would be more at home with making appeals grounded inthe personal truth of the Encouraging and the Sage voices. But it is unlikelythat Baptists would be attracted to making appeals in the Testifying Voice sinceit does not embody either of the two most salient inventional resources of aconstitutive Baptist rhetoric.39

Though excellence can be found in Baptist thought across the three remain-ing voices, the presuppositions of each voice are such that it is unlikely any oneBaptist preacher or parishioner would be equally at home in all of them. If aperson regularly engages in persuasively determinate speech, it would indicatea preference for the Teaching or the Encouraging Voice. If a person prefers toexplore personal truth’s emphasis on transformative change, it would indicatean ability to make use of either the Encouraging or the Sage Voice. The recentschism in the Southern Baptist Convention is illustrative. If my argumentholds, it is likely that the majority of Baptist leaders who led the battle to regaincontrol of the SBC would have a preference for the Teaching Voice while themajority of the Baptist leaders forced to form other Baptist alliances wouldlikely prefer to make appeals through the Sage Voice. The former would beidentified by their commitment to persuasion as an end while the latter wouldbe strongly identified by their reaffirmation of soul freedom and the tendencyto construct audiences as individuals on a journey of self-discovery. A thirdgroup, those most at home with the Encouraging Voice, are likely found onboth sides of the issue and feel confused by the division, as if the choice is forc-ing them to play to one or the other components of their identity.

THINKING LIKE A BAPTIST

For his collection of essays The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations onManagement, Jerry B. Harvey was initially surprised when, upon reading thebook in draft form, a fellow management professor responded, “You are, andI say this caringly, overly disposed to utilize the sermonic form”—a form char-acterized by “the everyday story that means something larger.” Harvey realizedthat “as a deacon in a semi-tub-thumping Southern Baptist church” he hadbecome accustomed to thinking like a Baptist and speaking like a tent-revival-ist.40 And rather than rewrite the essays as “fact-cluttered studies” he allowedthem to remain as meditations that invite readers to respond. The result is oneof the best ethics of management books available, a modest volume that nailsthe collapse of WorldCom and Enron before the fact as failures in the man-agement of agreement. Harvey thinks like a Baptist and speaks in a Sage Voicethat invites readers to respond by saying, “Whoa! What will I do with that?”

BEING BAPTIST 595


There is no surprise that I like Harvey’s book for the very reason a criticmore committed to order than to transformation struggles with it. Over thelast decade I suspect I have had my share of essays rejected in the reviewprocess because I intuitively structured my argument to move readers to say“Whoa! What will I do with that?”41 Academic journals generally prefer orderto transformation. They prefer essays that call forth a response such as “Iagree; you have proved your case” or even “Yes; this conversation matters.” Theformer is viewed as good science and the latter is viewed as good sensitivity toissues of pluralist concern. Both make appeal to order rather than transfor-mation. On the other hand, I chose to begin this essay in good sermonic formwith an illustration that poses the question to which the rest of my essayinvites a good “Whoa!” response. A social scientist, whose thought has beenstructured more by order than transformation, would likely have chased downthe source of the statistics in Willimon’s story or simply stipulated Willimon’sessay as the source for the statistics. Perhaps I was thinking like a preacher, butHarvey would probably say that I was just thinking like a Baptist.

My particular academic interest in persuasion is also an expression ofthinking like a Baptist. As one who has served as a pastor, I was always moreinterested in the question than the answer. I believe that positive changeoccurs in times of struggle rather than in times of settled conviction. When Ibegan to teach argument and persuasion in communication studies, I foundmy disciplinary practice at odds with my pastoral practice. In the classroom Iwas teaching students how to make persuasive appeals predicated on opposi-tional reasoning while in my preaching I was learning to make persuasiveappeals that invited a kind of Gadamarian “coming to understanding.”42 I wasbeing influenced by homileticians who have been aggressively exploring per-suasively indeterminate rhetorics of preaching during the past quarter-cen-tury.43 While writing my dissertation I also produced a brief essay publishedas “Postmodernism and the Function of the New Homiletic in Post-Christendom Congregations.” In this essay I raised the question whether newapproaches to homiletic practices, with their interest in creating an experienceof coming to understanding rather than making appeals grounded in rationalargument, invited a more suitable response from listeners given the prevailingskepticism one encounters in postmodern listeners.44 Of course, I wasintrigued with the way homileticians had been grappling with questions aboutthe divisive nature of the debate-driven model of argument in civic discourse,a question communication theorists have only recently begun to explore.45

The Matrix of Contemporary Christian Voices discussed above is part ofmy current project to explore the logical dimensions of a Christian rhetoricteased out of contemporary homiletic theory and practice.46 Being Baptist, Ifind myself in the odd place of being intellectually attracted by the theological



concerns of the Testifying Voice, but lacking the confessional glue so necessaryto the sacred ordering implicit to the identity of this voice. I may have crossedthe objectivist Rubicon by preferring indeterminate persuasive appeals to per-suasively determinate appeals, but being Baptist means I have a natural pref-erence for the Sage Voice with its implicit appeal to the individual on a journeyof self-awareness 47

In all of this I have come to believe that a denomination’s constitutiverhetoric can function as a core capability for argument invention. But corecapabilities invariably become core rigidities if they become insular, overcon-fident, and dogmatic.48 If Baptist thought remains irrevocably fixed in abygone era’s strategies of persuasive invention, it is inevitable that pathos willbe increased to supply the seeming deficit of a failed logos—the homileticequivalent of the sermon manuscript with the scrawled marginal note “Weakpoint; pound pulpit.” If we Baptists are willing to “unfreeze” elements of ourunexamined core commitment to persuasion as an end rather than a means, Iam incurably optimistic about the transformational possibilities for continu-ing innovation of the constitutive rhetoric of Baptist identity.49

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Professor Reid wishes to thank Clyde Fant and Walter Shurden for their coun-sel in the effort to identify the elements of a constitutive Baptist rhetoric andMargaret Zulick for her insights from social movement theory.

NOTES

1. William H. Willimon, “Come on Down,” Christian Century, February 10, 2004, 19.

2. On practices intrinsic to the Baptist identity, see William Henry Brackney, The Baptists, vol.2, Denominations in America, series ed. Henry Warner Bowden (New York: GreenwoodPress, 1988).

3. 2 Cor. 5:19, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

4. Jude 3, NRSV. Since the Reformation, preaching a Word of God has meant more thanpreaching the Word of God. The latter makes reference to the language of the Bible whilethe former implies, in the words of the Second Helvetic Confession, that “preaching of theWord of God is the Word of God” (introductory chapter).

5. See Lucy Lind Hogan and Robert Reid, Connecting with the Congregation: Rhetoric and theArt of Preaching (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1999), 58–59.

6. William Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1981),16–17.

7. Henry Vedder, Baptists and Liberty of Conscience (Cincinnati, Ohio: J. R. Baumes, 1884), 40.

8. Cf. Bowden, “Series Forward,” in Brackney, The Baptists, xiii. Non-Baptists would likelyunderstand these as a revivalist sensibility that privileges pulpit oratory and personal spiri-

BEING BAPTIST 597


tual experience, the practice of immersing believing converts, and a bottom-up reversedhierarchy that empowers congregational ecclesiology while limiting the power of a denom-inational bureaucracy.

9. Martin E. Marty, “Baptistification Takes Over,” Christianity Today, September 2, 1983,33–36. Marty is more concerned with the deleterious effects of Baptistification on churchesthat value corporate identity. He worries that Baptistification is winning.

10. See Richard Cimino and Don Lattin, Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the NewMillennium (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998). Nancy Ammerman reports that this “dimin-ishment of denominational identity” is symptomatic of contemporary religious expression, butthat people still tend to stay in broad religious families as they move about. See “Interview withNancy T. Ammerman,” by Tracy Schier at Resources for American Christianity,http://www.resourcingchristianity.org/downloads/interview_transcripts/Ammerman%20Interview.pdf .

11. Walter B. Shurden, The Baptist Identity: Four Fragile Freedoms (Macon, Ga.: Smyth andHelwys, 1993), 4–5.

12. Maring and Hudson note that this Baptist preoccupation to define an identity by way of dis-tinctives serves only to “foster a feeling of estrangement” from other Christians; Norman H.Maring and Winthrop S. Hudson, A Baptist Manual of Polity and Practice, rev. ed. (ValleyForge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1991), 5.

13. Insiders can readily hear in this formulation the implied concern of questions such as: (1)Is the SBC becoming creedal in the way it requires congregations and missionaries to con-form to its doctrinal statements? (2) Should SBC leadership be able to force congregationsthat ordain women out of the denomination? and (3) Is the continuing SBC withdrawalfrom larger Baptist affiliations such as the Baptist World Alliance indicative of a growingisolationist tendency? For background on the first question, see Walter B. Shurden in “ThreeDifferences in SBC and CBF,” The Baptist Studies Bulletin—A Monthly E-magazine,February 2002, at http://www.mercer.edu/baptiststudies/Bulletin/Feb02ARC.htm. For back-ground on the second question, see Stan Norman, “Fighting the Good Fight: The Strugglefor a Baptist Identity.” Originally published in SBC Life, April, 1999. Accessed athttp://www.baptistcenter.com . For background on the third question, see the news releasefrom the Baptist World Alliance: “SBC Executive Votes to Leave BWA—Sees No Hope forReconciliation” at http://www.bwanet.org/News/sbctoleavebwa.htm. On the charge of dema-goguery, see the rhetorical analysis of Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp, In the Name ofthe Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention (Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1999). For an extended sociological analysis of the schism that splitthe Southern Baptist Convention in the last quarter of the twentieth century, see NancyTatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the SouthernBaptist Convention (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

14. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 143. For a statement of convictions as a “confes-sional statement” rather than a statement of distinctives, see “The People Called AmericanBaptists: A Confessional Statement,” at http://www.abc-usa.org/identity/idstate.html.

15. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 159.

16. On “self” and “other,” see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); on “alterity” see Emmanuel Levinas, Alterityand Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).



17. See Rhys H. Williams, “From the ‘Beloved Community’ to ‘Family Values’: ReligiousLanguage, Symbolic Repertoires, and Democratic Culture,” Social Movements: Identity,Culture, and the State, ed. David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier, and Belinda Robnett (New York:Oxford University Press, 2000), 247–65. Williams has employed social movement theory toexamine the way religious denominations provide adherents with rhetorical resources thatare both contextual and public. Rhys. H. Williams, “Constructing the Public Good,” SocialProblems 42 (1995): 124–44; R. H. Williams and S. M. Alexander, “Religious Rhetoric inAmerican Populism,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33 (1994): 1–15. On generalsocial movement theory, see Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., Frontiers inSocial Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

18. Everett Goodwin, preface to Baptists in the Balance: The Tension Between Freedom andResponsibility, ed. Everett Goodwin (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1997), xvii.

19. I am grateful to Professor Margaret D. Zulick, who responded to several email queries abouta web posting in which she proposes a set of tensional themes to distinguish constitutiveand oppositional rhetorics as a function of social movement theory. The posting is athttp://www.wfu.edu/%7Ezulick/MovementTheory/Movement5.html. Her addition of theconcepts of genesis and re-genesis as additional frames through which to view social move-ments has been particularly useful. She is the author of the wonderfully evocative descrip-tion of denominations as “frozen controversies.” Any other misapplication of her themes iswholly mine.

20. Romans 10:9–10, NRSV.

21. John Henry Newman, “University Preaching,” in The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J.Svaglic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), 306.

22. C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students: Complete and Unabridged (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Zondervan Publishing, 1954), 336–48.

23. C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures, 337.

24. C. S. Lovett, Soul Winning Made Easy (Baldwin Park, Calif.: Personal ChristianityPublishers, 1980).

25. John R. Claypool, The Preaching Event (Waco, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1980).

26. John A. Broadus, “Author’s Preface to the First Edition,” On The Preparation and Delivery ofSermons, rev. ed., ed. Jesse Burton Weatherspoon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944),xii. Unusual capitalization in the citation is original.

27. Broadus, Preparation, 10.



30. Many denominations struggled with this problem. A hundred years after Broadus a Methodisthomiletician complained: “It was a fateful day when the venerable John A. Broadus asserted,in the work that was to become the standard in its field for generations, that homiletics was abranch of rhetoric. American homiletics has not yet been completely reconstituted after thisstroke which severed the head of preaching from theology and dropped it into the basket ofrhetoric held by Aristotle”; David James Randolph, The Renewal of Preaching: A NewHomiletic Based on the New Hermeneutic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), 21.

31. I assume objectivists are individuals who believe one can know ‘the truth,’ that perceptionis homomorphic with reality. I use the term interpretivists to describe individuals whoassume that ‘truth’ is variable and contextual, that reality is socially constructed through aculture’s language conventions, stories, and cultural frames.

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32. Wuthnow divides contemporary expression of faith as a tension between seeker-orientedspirituality and practice-oriented spirituality; Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spiritualityin America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 1–18; 168–98.

33. In 1979 Burrell and Morgan proposed a matrix of organizational communication in whichobjective-subjective views of reality are bisected by functional assumptions of managementconcerns with regulation (order) vs. radical change (transformation); Gibson Burrell andGareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology ofCorporate Life (London: Heinemann, 1979), 22. Cf. Jackson W. Carroll, As One with Authority:Reflective Leadership in Ministry (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1991), 57.

34. Though developed as a means to identify contemporary preaching purposes, the matrix ispart of my larger project to identify a theory of contemporary Christian discourse. On theneed for this theory, see Martin J. Medhurst, “Religious Belief and Scholarship: A ComplexRelationship,” Journal of Communication and Religion 27 (2004): 43. Two existing efforts tofill this lacuna are Charles H. Kraft, Communication Theory for Christian Witness, rev. ed.(New York: Orbis Books, 1991); and Pierre Babin and Mercedes Jannone, The New Era inReligious Communication, trans. David Smith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).

35. See Robert Stephen Reid, “Faithful Preaching: Faith Stages, Preaching Strategies, andRhetorical Practice,” Journal of Communication and Religion 21 (1998): 164–99.

36. An extended argument using this matrix to analyze practice can be found in Robert StephenReid, “Exploring Preaching’s Voices from Ex Cathedra to Exilic.” In Do Justice! The Cry of the8th-Century Prophets, The Rochester College Lectures on Preaching, vol. 5, ed. David Fleerand Dave Bland (Abilene, Tex.: ACU Press, 2004), 135–64. A second, extended argumentusing this matrix to array contemporary theories of homiletics can be found in RobertStephen Reid, “The Four Voices of Preaching,” paper presented at the annual meeting of theAcademy of Homiletics, December 5, 2003, Claremont, California. Included in the 2003Annual papers of the Academy of Homiletics, 147–58.

37. For the purposes of contrast, I have adapted the language of the PC/USA ordination vowsfor comparison. From “PC(USA): Ethical Conduct Standards for Ministers, Elders andDeacons,” at http://www.pcusa.org/ora/ethics/refer-01.htm. The president of theInternational Mission Board of the SBC, Jerry Rankin, issued an ultimatum that all SBCmissionaries must sign the “Statement of the Baptist Faith and Message” adopted by theSBC at the 2000 convention. For the argument that this is a move toward denominationalcreedalism among Baptists, see Robert O’Brien, Stand with Christ: Why Missionaries Can’tSign the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Helwys, 2002). View the“Statement” at http://sbc.net/bfm/default.asp.

38. For this reason Baptists may need to regularly question whether the attraction to preach orspeak “the truth” in the Teaching Voice may involve an unexamined commitment to the effi-cacy of persuasion rather than the efficacy of faith.

39. Baptists who embrace a revisionist theology might be able to assume aspects of the collab-orative nature of this voice, but it is unlikely that Baptists would be able to adopt its postlib-eral theological expression since the latter rests more deeply in the assumptions of aconfessional identity. On the distinctions between revisionist and postliberal theologies, seeWilliam C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1989), 154–74. On the confessional assumptionsof a postliberal perspective, see Richard Lischer, “Preaching as the Church’s Language,”Listening to the Word: Studies in Honor of Fred Craddock, ed. Gail R. O’Day and Thomas G.Long (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1993), 113–30.



40. Jerry B. Harvey, The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management (San Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 1996), 3.

41. One that made it through the process is my “Faithful Preaching” essay: The essay concludeswith “The present study suggests that theorists of the basic course in public speaking may wellneed to follow the lead of homileticians and ask, ‘What would it look like if we could teachstudents how to construct listening audiences in the public sphere for each of the classicalstrands of rhetoric?’ Contemporary homileticians believe it can be done. Do we?” Concludingwith a question that invites listeners to continue on the journey is classic Sage Voice.

42. On “coming to understanding as an event” of meaning, see Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth andMethod, 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad,1991), 309.

43. Robert S. Reid, Jeffrey Bullock, and David Fleer, “Preaching as the Creation of anExperience: The Not-So-Rational Revolution of the New Homiletics,” Journal ofCommunication and Religion 18 (1995): 1–9; cf. Richard L. Eslinger, The Web of Preaching:New Options in Homiletic Method (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 2002).

44. Robert Stephen Reid, “Postmodernism and the Function of the New Homiletic in Post-Christendom Congregations,” Homiletic 20, no. 2 (1995): 1–13.

45. In the public sphere critics are looking for responsible ways to engage in productive con-versation rather than divisive debate; for example, Harold Barrett, Rhetoric and Civility:Human Development, Narcissism, and the Good Audience (New York: State University ofNew York Press, 1991); Shawn Spano, Public Dialogue and Participatory Democracy: TheCupertino Project (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton, 2001); and The Public Conversations Project,2004, at http://www.publicconversations.org. Challenges to the debate model of argumenthave been effectively raised by feminist rhetoricians opposed to rhetorics of dominance andelitism; for example, Gregory J. Shepherd, “Communication as Influence: DefinitionalExclusion,” Communication Studies 43 (1992): 203–19; Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin,“Exploring Rhetoric Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,”Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18. Challenges have also been made by rhetori-cians who prefer dialogic coherence to alienating argument; for example, Mark L. McPhail,Zen and the Art of Rhetoric: An Inquiry into Coherence (New York: State University of NewYork Press, 1996).

46. My The Four Voices of Preaching is forthcoming from Brazos Press.

47. Some Baptists have argued that a contemporary confession of faith is needed to provide a“profound theological connectionalism” for a fragmenting Baptist identity, but I find suchappeals are less grounded in Baptist identity than in evangelical or fundamentalist ortho-doxy. For an example of this kind of call to connectionalism, see Scott M. Gibson,“Theological Connectionalism: A Perspective from American Baptist Evangelicals,”American Baptist Quarterly 21 (2002): 173–79.

48. This is language from organizational theorist Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Wellsprings ofKnowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation (Boston: Harvard BusinessSchool Press, 1995).

49. Though my use of “unfreeze” is meant to reverberate with my prior image of denomina-tions as “frozen controversies,” I am also using the term technically as the mechanism of cul-ture change identified by Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2d ed. (SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1992), 298–303.

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