A pertinent and challenging discussion of the Baptist Union of Great Britain Declaration of Principle by Stephen J Roe – well worth a read!
The Authority of Christ, the Holy Scriptures and the Baptist Union today
The recent process regarding the nature of marriage in the BUGB Ministerial Recognition rules has many doctrinal and pastoral implications for all GB Baptist churches, institutions and ministers in the social context of GB today. We are all seeking to be welcoming to all people – those seeking God, those who are Christians and those who are baptised members of the universal church of Jesus, and also members of local Baptist churches. We seek as churches in union to find God’s ways, and follow them with our fellow BUGB members, in the great vision of our Lord Jesus’ ‘Great Commission’ (Matt 28:18-20), making disciples, baptising them and teaching them to obey all Jesus commanded. The social and legal changes in UK regarding homosexual practice and marriage over the last 30 years have brought about much prayerful reflection, exploration, discussion, study, discovery and disagreement for Baptist churches. The processes of discussion and decisions in BUGB Council have been expressed in two resolutions:
- in 2016 affirming that Christian marriage is to be defined as heterosexual, but with the acceptance that Baptist ecclesiology allows individual churches within BUGB to make their own decisions about the recognition, acceptance and practice of homosexual marriage;
- in 2024 (after the lengthy detailed Consultation with the churches and ministers) that the Ministerial Recognition (Min Rec) rules regarding the definition of marriage as exclusively heterosexual for accredited ministers would not be changed.
One of the profound implications revealed in the 2022-24 process was the range of attitudes of Baptist churches and ministers to the Bible’s teaching on marriage, and by further implication, attitudes to the nature and authority of the Bible itself, and therefore also to the opening foundational statement of the BUGB Declaration of Principle (DP). In resolving the specific question about whether the Min Rec rules should be altered by changing the definition of marriage to include homosexual marriage, the BU Council, having decided that no change should be made, stressed the place of the DP as the brief document unifying our churches. All ministers must sign that they wholeheartedly support and accept the DP before they are accredited by the Ministry Dept, and churches must sign up when they apply to join BUGB. The DP’s opening and foundational statement is: “that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, is the sole and absolute authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures”. This focusses the disagreement among Baptist churches about extending the definition of Christian marriage to include homosexual marriage, raising vital questions about whether, in all conscience and sincerity, those who argue that the Bible’s teaching on God’s love, which now allows Christian marriage to be defined as including homosexual marriage, can stay signed up to the DP, and therefore remain in BUGB. Of course, the concluding clause of this point reads “and that each Church has liberty, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to interpret and administer His laws” – this gives freedom for individual interpretation and practice of Christ’s teaching, but how far should this freedom be taken, to stay true to the opening foundational statement?
The principal argument of people who wanted to remove the Min Rec limitation of marriage as only heterosexual was that: although everyone agrees that the Bible (in both OT and NT) condemns exploitative and abusive homosexual practice, it is silent on both homosexual orientation and on exclusive homosexual permanent covenanted relationships, because Jesus and Paul had no concept or understanding of these. Therefore, the church is now able to expand its concept and definition of marriage to include the homosexual marriage now legal in civic society in the UK and many countries. In fact it is argued that it is the natural Christian step to do this, because of the trajectory of the Bible’s teaching of God’s liberating love. Over time, this enables the church to emerge from the exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage throughout the Bible to a new development of support for people who have homosexual orientation to be able to express love, commitment and sexual relationships within a civil partnership or marriage, and also that churches can perform homosexual marriages in churches. The Biblical evidence for this is the extensive ministry and welcome Jesus gave to the marginalised and ‘sinners’, and also the vision of unclean animals given to Peter in Acts 10, which enables the church to receive new revelation of theology and doctrine from the Holy Spirit which differs from the teaching and practice of Jesus and the apostles. The church is thus empowered to apply the teaching and practice of Jesus within new contexts, and thus define new doctrine which differs from the Bible. In the BU context, it enables local churches to define that Jesus’ teaching and practice of love for the marginalized, and the whole trajectory of the liberating love of God revealed through the Bible, now allows and encourages homosexual marriage, despite the explicit teaching and life of Jesus and the apostles in the Bible which take the opposite position. It is only just, fair and consistent with the Bible’s teaching on God’s love, that people with homosexual orientation to be able to express loving relationships and sexual expression of that within marriage.
Although many Baptists who take the latter view describe themselves as evangelical, say that they are following the teaching of the Bible faithfully, and would argue that their extension of the trajectory of God’s love as described above IS a faithful obedience to the authority of Christ, this can only be justified by straining the words of the DP beyond their plain and clear meaning. Putting aside all the Bible texts about homosexuality, Jesus and the apostles teach that marriage is exclusively heterosexual, and the whole Bible from cover to cover is the same. Jesus wholly accepted and affirmed the teaching of the Jewish Scriptures and Jewish cultural traditions on marriage, and specifically defined heterosexual marriage as the only alternative to celibacy (Matt 19:3-12). The teaching and practice of the apostles in the NT do the same. The DP explicitly limits the scope of the authority of Christ in all matters of faith and practice to what is “revealed in the Holy Scriptures”. It is therefore illogical and beyond common sense to claim that, although Jesus and Paul taught that heterosexual marriage was the only form of marriage given by God (as defined in Genesis 2, which both quote from in their teaching on the nature of marriage), their other implicit teaching about the love of God means that really they believe the opposite, and want the church in the 21st century to discover this revelation; i.e. that their true implicit teaching that Christian marriage should include homosexual marriage contradicts and overrides their explicit teaching recorded in the NT.
The foundation of this argument is based on a rejection of the authority of Christ as revealed in the Bible, even allowing for interpretation and application relevant to the different cultural and historical context of the church. It rejects the Bible as an authoritative revelation of the will of God for the world, judging that Jesus’ teaching found there is incorrect, insufficient to address the needs of the world. I am sure most are familiar now with the ‘trajectory argument’ relating to slavery and the ministry of women in the church; i.e. that the seeds of revolutionary change were sown by Jesus and Paul in both cases, and we see evidence of those changes and direction of travel initiated by God in the NT. In parallel, the vision of Acts 10 specifically related to the equal inclusion of the gentiles within the church, as the gospel of Christ was applied through the revolution begun by Jesus and continued by the apostles recorded in Acts. The trajectory of this revolutionary doctrine began with the ministry of Jesus to a few gentiles (although of course it really began in Genesis and continued extensively throughout the OT) and it came in conclusively to land when it was definitively and authoritatively expressed by the apostles and whole Jerusalem church in Acts 15, and Paul’s letter to the Galatians (one of his two earliest extant letters, c.54 AD). The vision given to Peter was limited specifically to that vital issue of the gospel, as we see in the subsequent events and interpretation of them given by Peter in Acts 10 and 11, and it was wholly fulfilled within the apostolic period and NT writings. It cannot be sincerely used as a paradigm for any other new doctrine, especially if that doctrine contradicts the plain teaching and practice of Christ and the apostles. Only the viewpoint that the Bible’s teaching is time-limited, subject to human reason and the cultural and historic context of the church, could justify detaching this passage from its context, and making it universally applicable. Of course, all would agree that Biblical hermeneutics and ethics are open to reasoned debate, the impact of new evidence and sometimes majority decision – as the scenario in Acts 15 perfectly demonstrates. But the view that Christian marriage should now include homosexual marriage does not accept that the Bible reveals “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude v.3), the αραθηκη (the “deposit” of the faith as in 1 Tim 6:20, 2 Tim 1:12-14), and the “sole and absolute authority [of our Lord Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh] in all matters pertaining to faith and practice”. Rather, it treats the Bible as fallible, malleable and subject to fresh revelation from God at any time by the interpreter’s use of reasoning based on contemporary cultural norms. How can people say that our Lord Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh as in John 1:1-18, and that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him, but that his life, actions and teaching revealed in the NT are insufficient, and just plain wrong for our faith and practice, because there are things about human nature and experience that he did not know or take into account? And the same holds for Paul as the principal apostle of the early church, defining Christian understanding of the nature and authority of Jesus, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Keith Ward has written that the person of Jesus has
…a revelatory status – he is a historical point at which something new and crucial about spiritual reality is unveiled.
This revelatory status implies that Jesus was in a uniquely favourable position to know God’s presence, demand and promise. Within the New Testament itself, most explicitly in the Gospel of John, this was construed as a unique union of divine and human in the person of Jesus (“the Word became flesh” [John 1:14]).
… [Jesus] can plausibly be seen as the embodiment in one era of historical time of supreme and eternal Wisdom… If Jesus was the embodiment of divine Wisdom in a human person, then his teachings are of enduring significance for all human lives…
… in the biblical records of the life and teaching of Jesus, who is taken to be an authentic disclosure of the nature and purpose of God.
As the final authoritative revelation of God, Jesus and the apostles instituted the new things God was doing in the gospel. They made many radical irrevocable changes to the previous unfolding revelation of God (although many of those changes had been signposted in the OT). But with all the huge changes they made (although some, like views of slavery and the ministry of women, were begun discretely, for political safety’s sake), Jesus and all the NT writers chose to make no change whatsoever to the view enshrined in Israel and the OT – that God’s provision of marriage is exclusively heterosexual, as expressed in Genesis 2. In God’s continuing revelation of the ideals for creation revealed in the Bible, if God had intended that the ideal for marriage should be expanded to include homosexual marriage God would have made at least some incipient and implied changes through the ministry of Jesus and Paul to the nature of Christian marriage, as he had for the other ‘trajectory’ issues. As a principle of Christian liberation, this expansion of God’s ideal of marriage would presumably have been welcomed in 1st C. Greek and Roman society, with the open practices of various forms of homosexuality practised there (from abusive paedophilia to consenting sex, sometimes even within lifelong covenanted exclusive relationships mentioned in 1st C literature). But they chose to change nothing and never hint at any such change, even for this mission opportunity of relating to Gentile culture. In God’s final conclusive revelation of truth in Christ, God chose not to change the nature of marriage.
It is now time for all Baptists in BUGB to look at the DP and decide in all sincerity if they really do still uphold the plain meaning of its opening foundational statement. If they only can hold to it by rationalizing that the true teachings of Jesus, God manifest in the flesh, actually call the church to do something radically different to his explicit acceptance and endorsement of the OT’s teaching on marriage, then those people should either leave BUGB, or move for the DP to be removed, or amended to express the correct view of how the teaching of Jesus is to be understood and applied. The BUGB Council and Trustees have brought this matter into public debate among Baptist churches, and with the final decision made in March 2024, have stated in a statement of 20 March 2024 that “Council maintains that the basis of our Union is the Declaration of Principle”. In announcing the decision, Council called all churches to reaffirm the DP as the basis for future unity. It is now the duty of Council to require those who believe marriage should be redefined, to examine their conscience and act appropriately re the DP, as above.
Stephen J Roe
Minister, Walderslade BC
Nov 2024
