Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 19:1 (Fall 2001)
Article: To the End of Glorifying Jesus: The Scholar’s Calling to the Churches
Author: Malcolm B. Yarnell III

FM 19:1 (Fall 2001) p. 25

To the End of Glorifying Jesus:
The Scholar’s Calling to the Churchesa

Malcolm B. Yarnell III

Vice President for Academic Affairs
Dean of Faculty
Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
Kansas City, Missouri 64118

This paper was presented to a group of Baptist scholars from many nations and theological traditions gathered during the Baptist World Alliance meeting held in July 2001 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. The author was asked, as a “young and upcoming scholar,” to present a personal reflection on his vocation.

There are two related themes to this session of the BWA Academic and Theological Education Workgroup: “Loving God with All Your Mind” and “The Holy Calling of Christian Scholarship.” I want to take these two themes and reclaim a part of our Baptist heritage which has often been neglected in the modern era: the scholar’s overarching duty to edify the churches which glorify the Lord Jesus Christ.

That historic principle of Baptists called “freedom of conscience” has been taken in the twentieth century in a radically individualist direction. Earlier Baptists never pictured freedom of conscience as freedom from the ecclesiastical judgment of, and proclamatory shaping of individual consciences.1 Recently, the freedom mantra has been taken up with a vengeance as a denial of ecclesiastical authority over academic scholars: Thus, we have reached the place where “soul competency,”2 freedom of conscience, academic freedom, autonomy of the local church, and the “priesthood of the believer”3 have become code phrases for self-sufficient individualism. In short, many Baptist scholars have taken concepts from our Baptist heritage and pitted them against the traditional Baptist understanding of the church. Libertarian personalism has opposed itself, in the twentieth century, to orthodox views of Scripture,4 and more recently, to orthodox ecclesiology5 and Christology.6 It is on these three issues that disagreements among Baptist scholars can be the strongest: revelation, Christology, and ecclesiology. Let us here concentrate on the relation between scholar and church.

First, we must consider what it means to love God with all your “mind.” The Greek νοῦς is more holistic than our modern definition of “mind” which tends to be limited to t...