THE DIVINITY SCHOOL at WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
From the January 2007 print edition of Baptists Today. Used by permission.
Winston-Salem, N.C. - For everyone who has sat through a history class or read a historical book and was tempted to stereotype all historians as dusty, dry and humorless ...meet Bill Leonard.
Energetic and witty, Leonard is a popular speaker as well as the founding dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School. His credentials as a scholarly church historian are undeniable - a Ph.D. from Boston University following his studies at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
And when the American Baptist Historical Society decided a new history of Baptists was needed - after a half-century of Robert G. Torbet's A History of Baptists serving as the mainstay textbook on the subject - the group turned to Leonard. The result is Baptist Ways: A History (2003, Judson Press).
The author or editor of more than a dozen previous books, Leonard's historical account takes a wider view of Baptists than many earlier texts.
Before coming to Wake Forest to open the new divinity school in 1999, Leonard taught at Samford University, Seinan Gakuin University in Japan and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He often fills church pulpits and has served many congregations as interim pastor.
Baptists Today editor John Pierce visited with Leonard last fall in his office behind Wait Chapel on the university campus. This conversation is adapted from that interview.
Baptists Today: Do you have any idea of how much time and energy you have spent studying, observing and moving about among Baptists?
Bill J. Leonard: Oh, it's just been a huge portion of my life. I don't think I've ever really thought about that. Since I went to teach at the Baptist seminary in Louisville in 1975, I've pretty much stayed on the road in Baptist churches. I'm in other churches across the denominational map, but in those early days and through most of my life I've been in Baptist churches. I've had about 20 or 25 interims in Baptist churches. I still preach more than half the Sundays of the year, mostly in Baptist churches.
BT: What is it about Baptists that intrigues you?
BJL: The messiness. I used to think that if I left Baptists I'd become a Methodist - because Methodists in a large part educated me. But the Methodists, I've said, are too methodical for me. The messiness and diversity of (Baptists), and the longer I'm a part of it, draw me in. By messiness, I mean a kind of rabid localism that says each congregation is at least free to decide its identity under God. It's been that way, as I read it, since 1612. John Smyth's early confession in Amsterdam has this wonderful statement that goes something like this: "As all congregations hath Christ, so hath they all.” Then the article concludes: "Therefore, no congregation ought to have prerogative over any other.” That's 1612! And I'm fascinated that [so] long ago, that early, they were talking about the liberty of each congregation to determine its identity under God. Now that didn't mean there weren't rules, that there weren't guidelines for being Baptists, or that all the Baptists had to accept you, but I find that most intriguing. I also think I'm drawn increasingly to two or three things about the Baptists that galvanize me. This is from reading them all these years. One is I really think they have something when they talk about the believers' church - that this messy congregation should be a gathering of people who testify to faith in Christ. Out of that comes this strong sense that faith cannot be coerced. Therefore, they said, God alone is judge of conscience and neither the state nor an established church can dictate to the conscience in religious matters. It was the idea of uncoerced faith that led them to this strong view of conscience. It was this desire to protect the conscience that led them to dissent. And it was there from the beginning. Believers' church, conscience and dissent have become for me the most powerful sources of identity for what it means to be Baptist.
BT: This is often misunderstood, isn't it? You're not saying Baptists don't care about doctrinal positions - just that responsibility for those decisions rest on individual shoulders?
BJL: Well, from my point of view, those three things that I told you - believers' church, conscience and dissent - are very much what it means to be a Baptist. And I have thrown believer's baptism by immersion in there as part of the believers' church. But what I'd also want to say, if we're talking about being Baptists not about being orthodox Christians, is that Baptists began at both ends of the theological spectrum. So, yes, doctrine has been very important to Baptists. But they contradict each other. From the 1630s in England and then here, you can be a Baptist and believe in free will, falling from grace, and the general atonement of Jesus Christ. Or you can be a predestinarian, election, limited atonement Calvinist. So yes, Baptists have theological parameters that order them, but those theological parameters are contradictory. I mean they could be Methodist or Presbyterian with their theology, historically. So what is it that makes them put those theologies together in ways that would be distinctively Baptist? For me it's believers' church, believers' baptism, conscience and dissent. Then they are going to fight over and write contradictory confessions of faith over specific doctrines. They are unashamedly owning Trinitarianism and biblical authority and the doctrine of the church, the things that get into the confessions. But depending on whose confession you read, you have contradictory theology. So yes, Baptists have a theology - but it's multiple theologies.
BT: When journalists - particularly secular journalists - seek you out as an expert in church history, what do they usually ask you about Baptists?
BJL: Reporters have found out they can call me for basic information and not read a book. When I first started talking to reporters they wanted to talk about "the controversy” in the Southern Baptist Convention. They wanted to know the roots of the controversy - can you break that down? Now they want to know about this Baptist diversity - and where Baptist groups are going. So we talk about the influence of the breakup of the old denominational systems, the rise of the megachurch with its emphasis on localism, and local churches as mini-denominations in themselves - doing things for themselves in one congregation that the old denominational systems used to do for churches. We're beginning to talk about emerging church. Then they want to know if Baptists represent a case study in these kinds of religious transitions in American life. Now we talk less about the old denominational systems than the ways in which these external forces in American society, from the megachurch to the Republican Party, are influencing Baptists or are being influenced by Baptists. Then, of course, they sometimes want to talk about target issues like the role of women, the nature of Baptist missionary work and newer groups like the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship or the Alliance of Baptists or Baptists Committed. Then always race, race, race, race.
BT: Who are your two or three favorite Baptists of all times, and why?
BJL: That's an impossible question for a historian - because, in many ways, I have a great cloud of witnesses. I want to begin by saying that is an impossible question because I have so many heroes that I can't even rate them. So as soon as you're gone I'll think of 12 more that I should have told you. And my list changes from time to time because I intersect their lives with my life and with the lives of my students as I teach about them. I suppose no Baptist in the history of the world has had the influence Martin Luther King Jr. had. There is no way you could not put him on the top of the list as a preacher, as a scholar, as a rhetorician - not just a preacher, and of course as a civil rights leader who saw what others didn't see and gave it all for that. I always read in my classes that piece in Strive Toward Freedom where he talks about the early bomb threats, and gets up at two in the morning and gets a cup of coffee and sits at kitchen table and says to God: "I just can't do this. They are going to kill me and kill my family.” And he hears the voice that says, "Stand up and speak out for freedom and I will be with you.” It's that moment - and it's so Baptist - this immediate religious experience that grew out of the nurture he had in the black church. It's still very powerful to read. When he does that, it changes him from being a pastor who happened to be in a town where there was a bus boycott to the leader of a movement. So in terms of a person you go back to again and again, that is always out there ahead of you, King is one. And these days, I am absolutely taken with Ann Hasseltine Judson. There are so many sides to her. I'm fascinated with her and how brave she was. Part of what I didn't know until I started reading her was she went to a female seminary called Bradford Academy in New England and she read Jonathan Edward's History of the Work of Redemption. In reading Edwards, she decided that it was her duty to go and take this message to the ends of the world. She couldn't go as a woman so she had to find somebody, a man, who had the same vision that she could marry and go with. Then they go to Burma and become Baptists on shipboard. She begins a letter with: "Will you ever forgive me, my dear Nancy, when I tell you that I have become a Baptist?” She learns Burmese quicker than (Adoniram) does - he has a tutor - and she goes to the market. He gets arrested and taken off to Ava. She has to bribe the city government to get him food and medicine. Then she dies - and I think Adoniram was not even there, which was very common in that period. He writes this plaintive letter to her mother about her. Then she gets a history of her own and becomes the mythic figure for women in Baptist and Protestant mission life. There is a whole genre of literature about her that sort of mythologizes her. But when you get through that, there is her gutsiness, her insight as a theologian, as a Baptist and as a preacher - I still want to know more about her. Parenthetically, I'm fascinated by all three of his wives. Sarah Boardman Judson, whom he married next, had seven children by him in eight years - or six children in seven years, or something like that - and she dies. Then he marries Emily Chubbock Judson, and both of them are dead before their own biological daughter is 6 or 7. I am astounded by those women. There was a kind of acknowledged martyrdom, an implicit martyrdom, particularly for women who went out on mission. So Ann Hasseltine Judson I'm extremely taken with. Since you asked me for three...
BT: We could make it a Baptist Mount Rushmore and have four - but it doesn't sound like you want to carve your choices in stone.
BJL: No. But I guess if you are talking about seminal people, probably Thomas Helwys would do that for me because he saw all of this when other people didn't. He dies in prison, probably, and he writes The Mystery of Iniquity, which is, I think, the first book in English to call essentially for religious pluralism - not just radical religious liberty. He anticipated modern religious pluralism - that every voice should be heard and that neither a state church nor a state can inhibit religious voices. In that case he was beyond (John) Smyth who really wanted Christian freedom but didn't anticipate atheism and heresy in that way. Helwys seized that and literally dies for it. So as a seminal thinker for setting us on a path we always fall off of - and we've fallen off it now as Baptists by in large - everybody ought to read Helwys to see what's going on. Now, though he only stayed a Baptist for 15 minutes, probably one of the most seminal people in American religious life was Roger Williams - and I'm haunted by Williams. He is ever the seeker, ever the searcher. Brilliant, obtuse - you almost can't read him. But his ideas, when you read his A Key into the Language of America which is a lexicon of the Narragansett dialect, he saw what was happening to the Native Americans in ways almost no one else did in New England. He writes about it and challenges colonialism explicitly and in a brilliant way. Williams said: "I'm not going to tell anyone about Jesus until I know their language." So he does a lexicon and then he writes this verse, and I'm quoting it close: "When Indians see the cruel ways of English-Irish men, their murderous odes, their lying ways, then say these Indians: 'We wear no clothes, have many gods, and yet our sins are less. You are barbarians, pagans wild. Your lands the wilderness.'" That's in like the 1640s. He might as well have been in the 2000s for that insight.
BT: So he would have failed Continuous Witness Training?
BJL: Yes. But that's also the genius of these folks. They understood witness.
BT: In the preface to your book, Baptist Ways, you state: "Life, academics and controversy compelled me to become a student of the Baptists." Can you explain that?
BJL: My training in my Ph.D. was as a historian of American religion in general with a specific interest in revivalism and American mysticism. When I went to teach at Southern, we had a large church history department so we each had specialties. I taught courses in American religion and revivalism. But by the 1980s I was being asked to delve into the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1981 I published my first article about the controversy which was a paper given at the Florida Baptist Historical Society. It was called "Unity, Diversity or Schism: SBC at the Crossroads." In some ways, I was one of the first people to write and say where I thought the controversy was going to go. Turned out I was right. Then I started writing articles for The Christian Century on the annual convention and trying to describe what was happening among Southern Baptists to non-Baptist constituencies. I'll always be indebted to them for letting me work out some of my own personal struggles. Then in 1990 I wrote God's Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the SBC. That was my first monograph into Baptist studies. Out of that, Judson Press asked to do this general history (Baptist Ways) to sort of follow the model of Robert Torbet's History of the Baptists and Leon McBeth's The Baptist Heritage. Then out of that, Columbia University Press asked me do one in their series on religion in America, on Baptists in America. So I think I've written my last book on Baptists. I'll do something else. That's how my academic life went. But all of that was part of my own experience at the Baptist seminary in Louisville as the controversy came to one particular community. I was there when the board of trustees changed slowly to a much more rightward group with a particular agenda and knew that I had to leave. I saw what other families and professors were going through with decisions about where to go. I was president of the faculty group that did what I still call essentially "labor management negotiations" with the right-wing board of trustees that led to a particular covenant, which was a way of slowing down the inevitable so people could have some choices. We moved through: "What will moderates do about the SBC?" It was over in '85, I knew - with 45,000 (messengers) in Dallas. It was over for the national denomination. Then it was, "What about the institutions?” You saw the seminaries change as the boar's got majorities. Then it was: "What do you do to protect families?" We all knew that tenure wouldn't protect you indefinitely, but it will slow down the process of people that want to get rid of you so that when the helicopter comes from the embassy you'll be upon the roof. I will always be grateful to Tom Corts and Bill Hull for sending the helicopter for me. Samford, though I was only there for four years, was a place of healing for me in ways that I can never repay.
BT: Was it difficult while teaching at Southern during this time to interpret these events professionally and then, on the other hand, having to deal with the realities on a personal level?
BJL: Yes, except to say that the salvation was in the scholarship. By being forced to be somewhat objective, and to look at the historical tools, helped me. It let me find an outlet for talking about these issues and having a sense of where this was going.
BT: Why do Baptists fight so much over the Bible?
BJL: I thought you were going to stop with: "Why do Baptists fight so much?" Then we can get to the Bible. My basic response to the first part of that question is that Baptist congregational polity - this tension between individual and community, between conscience and dissent, between theology and identity - doesn't just make conflict possible, it makes it probable. I come back to the messiness of the Baptists. Baptists truly created a church that was a people's movement. These days we want to say those early Baptists had a kind of perfect ideal for individuality in community - no, no, no! What Baptist polity means is that everybody has voice. And once you say everybody has voice, you've opened the door to conflict immediately. But then it adds, "But we don't have to accept everybody's voice.” So the congregation - or segments of the believing community - can decide they disagree with the dissenters and toss them out. But then the polity is such that the dissenters can go across the street and start another Baptist church. This is a very important thing to say about Baptist conflict: There are worst things. One of the really sad things now about the Southern Baptist Convention is that it didn't go ahead and split early on instead of wasting all this energy on conflict and character assassination. But there was no way to stop what happened because people loved that denomination and loved their institutions - and wanted to be able to stay and couldn't. But sometimes a good split is the best way to cleanse a community. Episcopalians wish they could split now. But they have a polity that is tearing them apart. If they had a Baptist polity, they'd go ahead and get this over with, for example. So Baptist polity ensures conflict. This is part of the genius and why I love it. There is all this conversation about individualism … and that all the liberals and progressives and half the people in Texas made individualism normative and there was always this relationship between the individual and the community. Which is true, but it was always messy. Baptist polity is such that even when you have the individual and the community in balance, there is always the possibility that the community may need to hear the lone voice of the dissenting individual. Or that the denomination may need to hear the lone voice of the dissenting congregation that stands up and says, "No, you can't make laws that keep black people out of church,” or "No, you can't have policies that keep women out of the classrooms in theological seminaries.” It's only because of lone voices that Baptists get rescued from time to time. So I'm very hesitant to run to the kind of panacea that we've got to go back to the Baptist ideal of the individual and the community as a way of saving us from controversy. No, we have to look at that and that's a valid piece of Baptist history and polity, but we've always known that Baptists understood, implicitly at least, that they wanted a system where the community could be called into question by conscience of the lone dissenter. And that is genius. It's what keeps me Baptist.
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