Next week my denomination will receive the report from a special
committee tasked with seeking unity between Calvinists and
non-Calvinists in the Southern Baptist Convention. The report concludes
what I’ve long suspected: we have much more uniting us across these
questions than dividing us, and most of us are ready to love one another
and work together.
I think it’s important, though, to consider how both the Calvinist
and Arminian streams in Christian life bring important emphases together
when it comes to one of the most important questions of our time:
religious liberty.
James Leland was a Baptist evangelist in the revolutionary era, who
agitated Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to include constitutional
guarantees of religious liberty. He railed against the Anglican state
churches, with their restrictions on gospel preaching. He did so for
theological reasons. At one time, he defined his theology as one that
preaches “the doctrines of sovereign grace with a little of what is
called Arminianism.”
I think both traditions, and the in-between place, have some things
to contribute to our defense of a free church in a free state.
Many of our early Baptist forebears were thoroughgoing Arminians,
defining the freedom of the human will in libertarian terms. These
include such heroes as Thomas Helwys, who fought against the
government’s mistaken belief that it could overrule the conscience. Continue at Russell D. Moore
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