“WHAT A HERITAGE OF SOUL
LIBERTY!”
Dr. Stephen D. Jones, preaching
January 27, 2008
Text: 2 Corinthians 3:4-6, 17-18
Soul liberty may
have as much to do with my relationship as your pastor than anything else. There
is no question that pastors can have special authority. Today, that authority
generally must be earned; it is rarely granted automatically as once was the
case. But the fact is that Sunday after Sunday you come into this beautiful hall
of worship and the centerpiece of Baptist worship is preaching. And so you
listen to me for twenty minutes. And there likely isn’t anyone else to whom you
sit and listen in this way. Sometimes I regret that sermons cannot be
dialogues. I thoroughly enjoy sermon talkbacks as well as communal dialogues
that occur in sermon preparation. We’ll engage in both at various times in the
future. But it does mean in your spiritual formation that you are granting me a
special entry. And I am humbled by that.
For Baptists, we
practice what is called the freedom of the pulpit, which means that I am free to
say in this pulpit what I feel God calls me to say. I am accountable to God for
these words. And every week, I put myself through a rigorous spiritual exercise
just to ensure that my own filter or bias is accountable to scripture and to
God’s leading in my life. I don’t preach to please you; I preach to please God.
Galusha Anderson,
our pastor during the Civil War, tells of the reaction of Confederate-leaning
members of Second Baptist Church when he preached one Sunday evening against
slavery and against secession from the Union. Galusha writes, “They sent a
committee to me, asking that, inasmuch as I had fully expressed my views on the
great national issue, I would hereafter refrain from all utterances on the
subject in my pulpit, promising, if I would enter into such an agreement, that
they would resume their places and duties in the church. But I assured them. .
.‘I should be glad to keep you all in the church, and have you willingly grant
me unrestricted freedom of speech; but whether you go or stay I cannot put my
neck under the yoke that you have prepared for it.’” That, my friends, is what
freedom of the pulpit is all about.
But for Baptists,
there is another side, and that is soul liberty. A pastor can be granted
authority by a congregation who loves that pastor, who respects her call, and
who allows that pastor entry into their lives. But a pastor is not an autocrat,
not a ruler. Too many Baptist pastors disrespect soul liberty by treating their
congregations as their little fiefdoms where their will is always the
rule. Indeed, there is a pastor-centered movement afoot in Baptist churches
today that I find alarming. Our home church, the First Baptist Church of Kansas
City, has been an historic, progressive congregation much like this one singly
aligned with the American Baptists. However, some years ago they called a young
pastor who decided without consultation to immediately sideline the church’s
magnificent pipe organ. And he set aside the church’s governing structure and
self-selected a handful of elders who would maintain executive control over the
church, presumably freeing everyone else for outward ministries. Nearly all of
his actions and decisions were unilateral, and all of them violated the
historical context into which he had been called. Finally, he divided the
congregation and was asked to leave. Baptist pastors are not to be autocrats or
rulers. Nor are we theological police officers enforcing right doctrine.
And the one Baptist
principle that stands in the way and prevents that from happening is our deep
belief in soul liberty. Soul liberty is the freedom of the pew.
Galusha Anderson
offers this example. Not long after he preached his controversial sermon,
Anderson and his wife were invited to dinner at the home of a member of Second
Baptist who was a Kentuckian by birth. “He firmly believed that secession was
constitutional and right, and that slavery was of divine origin. . .He was
filled with indignation with my sermon. However, at the appointed hour, he sent
his carriage for us. On our arrival, after warmly greeting us at the gate, he
said to me, ‘I think that you had no right to preach on the subject of
secession; but you thought you had, and I do not think that this difference of
opinion should destroy our Christian fellowship. You have had your say, and now
that I have had mine, be so good as to walk into the house and make yourselves
at home.’” Anderson stated, “I rejoiced that we could hold and express
antagonistic political views without marring our brotherly love” (p. 141). Soul
liberty grants each person the right and responsibility to form their own
personal relationship with God in Christ and to formulate their own individual
theology and their own positions on issues of importance. Soul liberty can be
hard work. So many people today, as always, are searching for someone else to do
this work for them. So many people want to adopt someone else’s theology,
someone else’s doctrine, someone else’s creed. But soul liberty assigns this
admittedly difficult work to each of us, of making sense of our lives, making
sense of the world around us, and finding our way into relationship with
God. Those seeking uniformity or doctrinal purity will find Second Baptist
Church to be off-putting.
Someone needs to
tell Archbishop Raymond Burke that a softer touch would serve his purposes
better. His demanding the resignation of St. Louis University basketball coach
Rich Majerus for announcing as a private citizen that he was pro-choice and for
stem cell research was vindictive. It serves only to turn people away from the
Archbishop’s positions rather than draw support. Of course, soul liberty is a
Baptist concept, but one would have to say that our heavy-handed Archbishop is
the poster child for its antithesis. Unfortunately, there are Baptist leaders
who are just as heavy-handed.
The title of my
first book was Faith Shaping, and that describes the work of soul
liberty: we are called to engage in our own faith shaping. We are called to
create a climate in our church where people can actively shape their own faith.
As your pastor, I
do not stand between you and God. You do not need to go through me to find God’s
pardon or grace. God is immediately available to you. I can be an intermediary,
but so can each of you.
We do not believe
that persons can practice soul liberty in isolation from one another. We
practice soul liberty communally. That is why we have classes and groups for
youth and adults. It is in these settings that we best practice soul liberty. I
have been so pleased to discover at Second Baptist Church a tradition of
spirited discussion, the free interchange of ideas without censorship, the
freedom to raise questions, to air doubts, to pursue new ideas unimpeded. There
has to be the freedom to challenge ideas, to lovingly question one another. But
to finally allow each other the freedom to find God in our own way.
Without one
another, however, we easily become lost. Without one another, we lose the
ability to correct our own personal bias. Often, we cannot truly hear ourselves
until we hear others respond to our own voice. When I hear what you say in
response to me, I gain an entirely different perspective on my own truth. And
that is invaluable, and without the communal practice, soul liberty enshrines
narrow bias. When I practice soul liberty, I can never have my mind fully made
up. I can never close myself off to new insights. When I practice soul liberty,
I must remain open to my community of faith and to the wider world. Soul liberty
becomes needlessly individualistic if I practice it alone.
My mother tells
the story of visiting her brother’s church in Casper, Wyoming. And in a Sunday
School class, an old rancher was speaking. He said, “I just can’t understand how
folks in your part of the country have racial prejudice against black
people. It’s just wrong.” But within a few breaths, she heard him say, “Now as
for the Indians, they are all a bunch of alcoholic good for nothings.” Casper,
of course, has very few African Americans but many Native Americans. And that
narrowness of vision, to not catch our own bias, to not see clearly our narrow
assumptions, is the reason soul liberty must be practiced communally.
Soul liberty means
that there is very little uniformity within Baptist churches. Often like-minded
Baptists congregate together, and that is one reason we have the freedom to call
ourselves a progressive Baptist church. There is some theological consensus
among us. We are attracted together in this church not because of our race, not
because of our gender, not because of our age, but because there is a broad
theological consensus that we hold in common. But that must never include
censorship, never include a common creed, never include a severity at the
margins of our faith. I urge people to be clearest about the center, the core of
your faith and allow the edges and margins to breathe.
Soul liberty is the
greatest gift we can offer to those who visit our church in a spiritual
search. We can say to our guests, “Here, at Second Baptist Church, you will find
the freedom to shape your own faith within a community of others engaged in the
same mutual exercise. Here, you will have the burden to decide for yourself, but
also, to always remain open to the possibility of self-correction. Here, at
Second Baptist Church, the pastor and the people respect soul liberty.”
There aren’t many
places like this in our world. And it is a precious gift that we hold in common
and offer to others. Unfortunately, many Baptist churches have deeply
compromised soul liberty, becoming creedal, closing down questions, shutting off
discussion, and yielding personal responsibility to the autocratic rule of a
pastor or group of elders.
Soul liberty also speaks directly to another of our Baptist freedoms, which we
explored earlier in class today, that of Scriptural Liberty. We hear a challenge
today to Scriptural Liberty among Baptists. When we come to any controversial
topic there are those among us who not only know how to interpret Scripture for
themselves, but also for everyone else. Whether the issue be abortion, stem cell
research, the rights of women, capital punishment, the inclusion of homosexuals
in the church or nearly any other moral issue, biblical literalists often
believe they “own” the only Scriptural position. In point of fact, the Bible
isn’t nearly as clear as they state. There is a far broader spectrum of
interpretation than what some would have us believe. The Bible isn’t meant to be
prescriptive, telling us exactly what to do. It isn’t a rule book. The Bible is
meant to be interpreted, the Word of God broken open so that we can enter into
it and hear its message to us. Anytime anyone says, “I know what the Bible says
for you. . .,” they are guilty of violating scriptural and soul liberty. I can
tell you what the Bible says to me. But I have to leave your work of
interpretation in your hands. What I do not have the freedom to do, as a
Baptist, is to ignore Scripture or minimize its authority. But we are not
“Biblicists.” We do not worship the Bible. The Bible is one source of authority,
but another source of authority is our own experience of God in our lives. And a
final source of authority is the community and tradition of faith to which we
belong. And we weigh the Bible, the community, and our own experience of God in
shaping the highest and truest understanding of our faith.
The Apostle Paul
advocated freedom repeatedly in his letters to his young churches. “Now the Lord
is the Spirit,” he claimed, “and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17).
One little girl was
not about to allow her teacher to impose upon her freedom to think. The little
girl was telling the teacher the story about Jonah being swallowed by the
whale. The teacher said, “That’s physically impossible because a whale’s mouth
is very small.”
The little girl
argued but the teacher repeated, “A whale cannot swallow a human being.”
The girl said,
“When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah.”
The teacher said,
“What if Jonah went to hell?”
The girl responded,
“Then you ask him.”
In the 1800’s,
Francis Wayland said, “We have always proclaimed that every child of God has the
right, in his own person, of drawing near to God through the intercession of the
one only Mediator and High Priest.” Wayland warned against the “universal
tendency of teachers of Religion to. . .assert dominion over the conscience, and
to use the power which they have usurped for their own advantage” (Baptist
Roots, Judson Press, p. 221). In defending soul liberty, Wayland said that
Baptists “have always believed in the absolute right of private Judgment in all
matters of Religion. . .Everyone of us must give an account of himself unto God”
(222).
Voices like these
should reverberate through the halls of the church. Despite the stereotypes
about us, we must tell the world, “You do not know the Baptists: For we are a
freedom-loving people!” Amen.
