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Issue 033 <previous< Issue 034
Volume 7 No 3 June 2001
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NEW
See/Print Complete June Issue
NEW Herschel
Hobbs on Baptist Freedom President Brister, members of the faculty and student body, other guests and friends, it is my privilege this morning to both stand before you in this gorgeously renovated chapel and to offer yet one more lecture in a long and prestigious series of talks known as “The Herschel H. and Frances J. Hobbs Lectureship in Baptist Faith and Heritage.” I’m humbled as I scan the list of luminaries you’ve hosted over the decades, Hobbs himself, of course, being one of them. Yesterday, November
the 28th, 2000, marked the fifth anniversary of Herschel Hobbs’
death. And as this was brought to my attention by one of our church members, I
began to reflect upon his faith and message and legacy, and decided to try to
imagine what Herschel Hobbs would say to us if he were alive today. I have
watched a video of him speaking about the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message. I
listened to audio tapes of his sermons, read several of his books, and spoke to
the dozens of folks who are still very much a part of the First Baptist Church
of Oklahoma City who knew him well. No, I can’t pretend to know the man
intimately, but I have come to understand just a few of his priorities, for he
tended, like any truly effective teacher/preacher, to repeat the most salient,
important points over and again. He reinforced these beliefs; he articulated and
rearticulated these priorities. At times he almost seemed to breathe them. And
even though several in our denomination have made some rather unfortunate
remarks over the last few months about Dr. Hobbs being “naďve” as he led
the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message Committee, and that he was “duped” by
proponents of neo-orthodoxy, I consider him to be one of the most important
Baptist statesmen of the 20th century. We would do well, today, in
light of the revisions made to the Baptist Faith and Message last June, and the
resulting soul searching that many of us have done, and continue to do, to heed
Herschel Hobbs’ wise counsel. What About
Huldah This Mother’s Day? Hopefully, some Baptist preachers will read this column before conjuring up their Mother’s Day sermons. Although not a seminarian, I have absorbed 50-plus Mother’s Day sermons and suspect that Modern Hermeneutics has had more to teach about postmillennialism than about motherhood. Yet in my dictionary, “postmillennialism” is sandwiched between “postmenopausal” and “postnasal drip.” How apropos! I can’t speak for you, but I can envision in this juxtaposition the rich outline of a three-point sermon. You would think that even without hermeneutics or dictionaries, preachers would be able to get a better handle on motherhood, a subject whose ties to apple pie and the American flag are legendary. Yet come Mother’s Day, the tendency is to retreat to tradition and trot out a sugar stick. I reckon there is safety in
predictability. And some things are predictable. Still a
Baptist Woman
The planners for this Oklahoma Conference on Baptist Women invited me to be the banquet speaker and address the subject, “Why I am still a Baptist.” They said, “We want you to tell your story.” I will give you three reasons and tell you three stories to satisfy that assignment. I am a Baptist because of my
captivity, my exodus, and my pilgrimage. My captivity
status helps me understand being human and defines me; my exodus
experience helps me recognize the divine and shapes me; and my
pilgrimage formation helps me synthesize the human and the divine
and identifies me. Being Baptist puts those interpretative strategies in
my power because of basic Baptist adherence to soul liberty and soul
competency in the captivity; individual freedom in Bible study and prayer
in the exodus, and priesthood of the believer and church autonomy in the
pilgrimage. Because we connect with each other most thoroughly through our
stories, I will tell you a story about each of those areas and explain it
through my assimilation of its meaning in my life in the three areas I will
address and interpret as I tell you why I am still a Baptist. Can You
Believe in Inerrancy AND Equality
One’s first reaction to the title question might be, “Of course you can, because I do!” but that hardly explores the important issues involved. The question arises because some who believe in a subordinate position for women in church, home, and world accuse biblical egalitarians of such things as “not believing the Bible,” or at least not being fully committed to it. A letter to the editor appeared in the Baptist Standard, the newspaper of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. It spoke of “those who hold the Scripture inerrant and its principles binding (such as the husband being head of the wife as Christ is head of the church).”[i] The implication is that it is impossible to harmonize the doctrine of inerrancy and a belief in gender equality. Apples and Oranges Actually, the letter quoted and the title of this article deal with two completely different issues, and we need to be careful not to confuse them. Inerrancy is a
doctrinal position, a conviction regarding the nature of the Bible. A belief in
the equality of male and female, on the other hand, is a matter of the
interpretation of the Bible, hermeneutics: “The place of women in the Bible is
an interpretive, hermeneutical question. It is not an inerrancy question.” Public Executions, Then and Now
©2001 Rome is a little community situated on Route 81 a few miles southwest of Owensboro. It was home to my father Tom Moody when he began his student career at Daviess County High School. No single day of school however was as memorable, as unusual as August 14, 1936. Long before sunrise Tom and older
brother Bill rolled out of bed, dressed, and ate the breakfast prepared
unusually early by their mother, Mabel Moody. The boys took up a familiar
position by the side of the road and thumbed a ride into town. There were plenty
of cars, even at that hour of the day, bringing the curious from places like
Rumsey, Guffie, Panther, and Calhoun.
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The Most Influential Christian Ethics Book I have read Headcoverings
and Women’s Roles in the Church: Both sides in the current debate over the role of women in the church appeal to the Bible to support their positions. Those who feel that there should be no restrictions on women's ministries appeal to examples found throughout the Scriptures of women serving faithfully and effectively as prophets, judges, apostles, teachers, and in countless other roles of leadership and service. Those who believe that some roles must be reserved for men typically appeal, on the other hand, to three passages found in Paul's writings: 1 Corinthians, 11:2-16, 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, and 1 Timothy 2:8-15. Even if one agrees with a restrictive reading of these passages, however, one must also acknowledge that they each present numerous textual, translational, and interpretive problems. All those who turn to the Bible for ethical guidance should therefore be concerned with the solution of these problems, so that the Bible's teaching might be more clearly understood and the entire church might benefit. This
article is an attempt to solve one specific problem: the proper translation of
the word exousia in 1 Corinthians
11:10 ("for this reason the woman ought to have exousia over her head, because of the angels"). The translation
of this word has been given much attention, since it is crucial for
understanding the passage (11:2-16). Based on the way Paul uses this and related
terms (exesti, exousiazein) consistently
throughout his epistle (6:12, 7:4, 7:37, 8:9, 9:4-6, 9:12, 10:23) it should mean
something like "freedom of choice." The statement should thus be
translated, "Therefore a woman ought to have freedom over her head,"
or, more loosely, in context, "a woman ought to be free to wear a veil or
not, as she wishes." A Near Death
Experience Old Red is still alive after 30 years of driving to and from deer leases. I stay off the highways with her now. Mostly I fire her up on Sunday evening and take the trash down. Old Red, for those of you who have not read the original story, is a ’67 Ford pick-up. I paid $1,200.00 for it in 1971. It was worth every penny. Me and Old Red almost parted company this time. I was cruising down Highway 71 between Llano and Brady, about six miles west of Pontotoc. It’s hard to describe the
elation that comes from being alone on the way to the deer lease. A whole
weekend with no cares. Sitting around the campfire with my friends. Hunting with
my sons. I’m singing as I roll along. (Old Red doesn’t have a radio.) Challenge for
Today’s Fathers My Father's Day thoughts this year were influenced by the fact that this was my first Father's Day to be a grandfather. I feel I have tried to be a better father than my own was, and am sure my son will try to be a better father than I was. (My son will undoubtedly have the easier task). If every generation of fathers
strives to be better, fatherhood should soon reach some level of perfection.
Right? Not necessarily. In the fast-paced twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
each generation sees the failures of their own fathers in the light of new
realities. Every father seems to run one or two generations behind the needs of
his particular time. Resolutions to be better fathers largely reflect the need
to be more up-to-date. Do
Health Care Corporations Have A Conscience? Since when does a corporation—a pharmacy, an insurance provider, a research group—have a conscience?” This is a question raised in reaction to a bill introduced recently in the Kansas Legislature on behalf of the Kansas Catholic Conference. The answer may have wide-ranging effects, but not for the activities of corporations like Exxon or Boise-Cascade who claim to be acting out of conscience in reducing pollution or lumbering responsibly. The Kansas bill and nearly identical bills elsewhere are putting a new twist on the meaning of conscience, not in the field of the environment, but in the field of health care. To declare that a corporation or legal entity can claim “rights of conscience” identical to an individual’s claim of conscientious objection to certain types of health care, is to blur a crucial meaning and destroy an important legal distinction. That is what is at
stake in the Kansas bill introduced not on behalf of a minority group like the
Mennonites or Quakers claiming conscientious objection to war, but by the
politically powerful Catholic Conference in Kansas claiming the right of not
only individuals but of corporate groups to refuse to engage in any activity
forbidden by the Vatican, even when it is legal and customary for all patients. Book Review by Darold H. Morgan An Hour Before
Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood Indisputably, President Jimmy Carter is the most respected living former president of the United States, as well as the most famous Baptist Sunday School teacher in the world. Much of that esteem has come from his highly publicized work with Habitat for Humanity and through the Carter Center on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, where he and his wife work ceaselessly to help in problem areas around the world. Add to these well-known facts their beautiful loyalty to a little Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, and you have reasons for lauding both President and Mrs. Carter as exemplary citizens. In this recently published book,
which in reality is an autobiography of childhood days on a farm in rural
Georgia, we have an enhancing and thoroughly captivating insight into who Jimmy
Carter really is. It makes for genuinely fascinating reading. Publicity about
this book may be correct when the inference is made that it has the potential of
becoming a classic! A Walk in the Woods Today I took a walk in the woods. It was a splendid tonic. I drove sixty miles to my boyhood home in East Texas, parked the car near a clump of tickle-tongue trees, and moseyed down the long country lane from where our barn used to be to our patch of woods. Those woods are situated in the northwest corner of the property my parents bought for $100 per acre about 80 years ago. That price included the two-story, four bedroom house where I was born, a big barn, an ample shed for a car, a wagon, tools and farm implements, a henhouse, a smokehouse, a cistern, a well, and several remarkably fine neighbors. But woods themselves on this
pleasant early spring day, were the locus of my ecstasy. There were black jack
oaks, post oaks, pin oaks, elms, persimmons, cedars, hickories, ash, and a big
thicket of huckleberries. The land itself was partly sandy knolls and partly
flat little glades given to retaining rainfall and domiciling crawfish. Reflections
on Holy Weeks! Who would have thought that God And, who would have thought that God
(Which is Luke’s way of saying:
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