Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 08:4 (Winter 2004)
Article: God, Revelation, and Community: Ecclesiology and Baptist Identity in the Thought of Carl F. H. Henry
Author: Russell D. Moore

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SBJT 8:4 (Winter 2004) p. 26

God, Revelation, and Community:
Ecclesiology and Baptist Identity in the
Thought of Carl F. H. Henry

Russell D. Moore

Russell D. Moore serves as Dean of the School of Theology, Senior Vice President for Academic Administration, and Professor of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as executive director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. Dr. Moore is the author of The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Crossway, 2004). He is also a contributing editor of Touchstone magazine.

Introduction

The most important question one can ask a theologian is where he goes to church. So argues ethicist and provocateur Stanley Hauerwas in his critique of the disconnection between the religious academy and the life of the local congregation.1 This question has never been more relevant, as ecclesiology has re-emerged as a point of hearty theological disputation across the spectrum of contemporary Christian theology. In mainline Protestantism and the liberationist wing of Roman Catholicism, revisionist theologians struggle with how a doctrine of the church can fit in movements built on dissent and distrust of authority.2 Other theologians seek to ground the doctrine of the church in the Trinitarian life of God, or the imago Dei present in humanity. Hauerwas himself is spearheading a project to present the church as a “counter-culture” in distinction to what he dismisses as “Christendom.” Within evangelicalism, “post-conservatives” such as Stanley Grenz attempt to “revision” evangelical theology with the doctrine of the church (or, more precisely, the community of God) as the central organizing motif for doctrinal formulation.3 Meanwhile, “traditionalists” seek to recover a confessional ecclesiology against the backdrop of an increasingly individualized American culture and from a parachurch evangelical ethos that has marginalized ecclesiology behind allegedly more pressing concerns such as evangelism and social action.

The question of ecclesiology is especially important for contemporary Baptists whose confessional DNA is shaped by a particular doctrine of the church. Southern Baptists, whose denominational self-consciousness was forged in nineteenth- century ecclesiological polemics against infant baptism, the Campbell movement, and the Landmark controversy, now are in the midst of a protracted internal debate over what it means for a church to be “Baptist.” The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), after weathering the debates over biblical authority in the 1970s and 1980s, remains badly-fractur...

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