Southern Baptists

Evangelicals and the Problem of Free Will

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Having been raised as a Southern Baptist, I was taught from a very early age that the Bible is God’s holy word, that it is infallible, and that it presents humanity with essentially a road map of how to live on earth and how to ensure one’s soul goes to be with God in heaven for all eternity after life on earth is over.  The central truth of the Bible is the work of God’s only son, Jesus, on the cross.  The only source of salvation and forgiveness of sins is through his death and resurrection.  This is still the basic creed of all Christian evangelicals, not just Baptists.  As the Christian fundamentalist movement swept through the South in the 1970s, the dogma became more emphatic, especially the concept of the Bible being inerrant.  I can remember pastors only half-joking when they stood in their pulpits, held the Bible up over their heads, and said, “I believe every word of this book.  Even when it says ‘genuine leather’ on the cover, I believe it!”

Evangelicals believe that God loves his creation and that he also has desires, the strongest of which is for humanity to return his love.  Humans express this love by obeying God’s commandments.  But, above all, humans demonstrate their devotion to God by believing that Jesus is his only son and that accepting his sacrificial death as atonement for their natural sinful state miraculously repairs the fallen relationship with God (Adam, Eve, rotten fruit, etc.).  Again, for evangelicals this part of the plan is crucial.  It is only the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus that can bring God and humanity together, which not only empowers humans to obey God’s commandments but also grants their souls an eternity with Jesus, who is actually God in human form just to complicate matters further.  The alternative is rejecting God and facing an eternity in hell — complete separation from God with a whole lot of torture, anguish, teeth gnashing, ill-tempered serpents, and the like.  God wants humans to love him, and by its very definition, love is something that has to be voluntary.  God doesn’t force humans to love him, which wouldn’t be genuine love.  Humans have the freedom to either love God or reject him, another key component of the whole arrangement.

Another part of the Baptist training was embracing the perfect nature of God.  The Bible is infallible because it is inspired, if not ghost authored, by God himself.  God is omnipotent and omniscient — there is nothing God cannot do, although he certainly elects not to do plenty of things.  All options are open to him.  He knows everything that has ever happened and will happen, past and future.  In fact, everything that happens ultimately conforms to God’s will.  So even the most mortal sins committed by humanity, although contrary to God’s wishes, eventually fold into the greater plan of God for the universe.  God’s will is unavoidable.  When I was growing up, it would have been inconceivable that there could be anything that God didn’t already know.  The evidence for this concept for evangelicals is found in the Bible in Jeremiah 1:5. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”  Putting aside the fact that this verse refers specifically to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, my fellow Baptists cited this verse as proof that God knows individuals, and individual souls, before they are conceived and born.  Remember, time is irrelevant for God. Past, present, and future are all in his command.

Now we come to the problem that is free will.  As stated earlier, evangelicals adhere to the principle that God loves humanity and wants his love returned.  John 3:16 is probably the most important verse in the entire Bible to evangelicals: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  People are given the option to believe that Jesus is God’s son and that his sacrifice is the source of their salvation and relationship with God. However, it is painfully obvious that millions, if not billions, of people do not accept Jesus as their savior and therefore miss the salvation boat altogether.  Which brings us to the troubling question about the true personality of God.  If indeed God knows everything, and if he is not constrained by time, and if he knows all that is going to happen, then it reasonably follows that he knows which individuals will return his love and which ones will reject him, before they are even born.  Given this premise, it follows that the God who can do anything actually chooses to allow people to be born even though he knows they will ultimately reject him and thus be cursed to an eternity in hell.  Is this lais·sez-faire approach the only means by which God can secure the love of humanity?  Do billions of people have to be cast into hell to gather a minority of people who will love God, accept his gift of salvation, and share eternity with him?

Evangelicals who adopt this paradigm are faced with a God who is at once all-loving while also being extremely negligent of the majority of those he apparently loves.  In the case of humanity’s free will, God is obviously electing not to impose his omnipotence and letting humanity chart its eternal course.  Is this a situation where God is simply choosing not to know something?  Keeping secrets from himself?  If we think about this for more than a minute or two, we must come to terms with a God who is “writing off” a significant portion of the population as damned, when he could have easily spared them an eternity of torment by not allowing them to be born in the first place.  As a father, I would do anything within my power to prevent my son from committing suicide, especially if I could ensure that he had a bright future.  What kind of father would I be if I didn’t attempt to intervene?  Given the same circumstances, most fathers would do the same.  If parents could know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they were going to conceive a child who would suffer horrific pain for an entire lifetime, would they elect to have such a child just for the sake of starting a family?  Are we more compassionate than God?  Free will doesn’t seem like such a valuable gift when we consider the stakes.  If this is God’s plan for getting the love he wants, what does this really tell us about God?  Something’s missing here.  It’s a problem.

Worship Without Music

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As stated previously in this blog, I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church (SBC).  Generally speaking, Southern Baptist worship, especially during the main service on Sunday mornings, could be described as a passive experience by the majority of people present, namely the congregation.  There are a couple of exceptions.  In recent decades, it has become popular to insert a time of greeting around the midway point of the service, which involves handshaking, hugging, some folks walking all around the sanctuary to apparently greet as many people as possible until forced by embarrassment to finally get back to their seat.  This practice is not limited to the Baptists either.  The only other part of a SBC service that encourages participation by everyone in the sanctuary is music, and for Baptists, music is a central part of worship.  SBCs give music a lot of space and time, from large pianos and organs for traditional worship services, to full-scale bands for “praise” services, and even small orchestras for the mega-churches.  They include several hymns for the congregation to join together singing.  SBCs also tend to employ full-time ministers of music, who typically are paid better than other support staff in most denominations with comparable-sized churches.  They typically have choirs for all age groups, along with an adult choir that practices weekly to present calls-to-worship, anthems, benedictions, etc.  Some churches even have special musical groups like hand-bell choirs, vocal or instrumental ensembles, and pop bands.

The format of worship in a SBC was certainly a suitable environment for my development with respect to the central role of music.  I was raised in a family that appreciated music, had some musical abilities, but above all encouraged musical skill and performance in my generation of youngsters.  My sister and I both took music lessons — she with the piano and I with the guitar.  I was brought up to sing church songs from a very early age, even before I can remember.  My earliest memory of singing was when my mother and grandmother took me out in the countryside to visit a bedridden relative of my grandmother (a sister or cousin, I’m not sure which), and I was instructed to sing a short song I had learned in Sunday School.  The song was titled “He’s Able.”  I still remember the words and the tune to this day:

He’s able, He’s able, I know He’s able
I know my Lord is able to carry me through
He healed the broken hearted, and he set the captive free
He made the lame to walk again, and He caused the blind to see
He’s able, He’s able, I know He’s able
I know my Lord is able to carry me through

As I became a teenager, my guitar skills developed enough that I could accompany myself singing, and could also play for youth group gatherings in my church.  My voice also matured to a fairly solid tenor, perhaps with a higher range than most guys my age.  I sang in choirs, performed at church functions (often with my sister and a cousin), and eventually reached what some would have considered the pinnacle of the music scene in a SBC — presenting “the special” during Sunday morning worship.  This song, typically a solo but sometimes a duet or trio, was usually placed in the service just before the pastor’s sermon.  For the 40+ years I was in a SBC, that part of the music service was always referred to by ministers and congregants as “the special” or “special music.”  Unfortunately, a label like that can encourage a certain sense of pride, if not arrogance, by the person offered such a place of distinction.

My love for music at an early age, combined with the ability to play the guitar (fair, but not very skilled) and a voice that my friends and family thought was pleasant, presented me with the opportunity to be a regular part of the special music rotation, almost always as a solo.  As I grew to adulthood, moved away from home, and started a family, I settled in another SBC where I continued with this practice.  I taught myself to play the piano and eventually began to accompany myself with that instrument.  It is with humility and perhaps some shame now that I look back on the decades of my musical contributions as a soloist because I realize that, all too often, I know what I was doing more than anything else was performing.  More than providing a meaningful worship experience for myself and the congregation, I was seeking to be an entertainer, to impress an audience, to attract their attention, to win their love.  So many people in SBCs will tell you that music is essential to their worship experience.  They will boast about their choir and exalt their music ministers.  But, they usually reserve their highest admiration for the people who perform special music, posting or sharing videos of them on their social media pages.  I enjoyed this kind of adulation all the time, and it was a rush.  My fellow church members were kind and gracious, and I have no doubt they were perfectly sincere when they told me how much a song I sang or wrote meant to them and enhanced their worship experience. I was touched by their encouragement, but what I craved was to amaze them.  Alas, I am vain.

After a divorce and a time of transitioning away from the Baptist church (I had left it theologically many years before), I met a beautiful Episcopalian.  And then I married her.  Everything changed, and for the better — much better.  I found a home in the Episcopal Church, with a theology that I could embrace without too much difficulty.  My wife introduced me to an early morning service at our small town church that she really liked because it was quiet, peaceful, reverent, and completely without music.  I had never been to such a service, and much to my surprise, I loved this style of worship.  After decades of being in churches where music was so central and where I was such a visible participant, it took me a while to understand why I was attracted to a service without music.  I think it is because I know that music was too often a distraction for me.  Instead of helping me get beyond myself to seek communion with the divine, it fed my ego and kept me in the foreground.  Performing caused me to focus on technique, style, quality, and even appearance.  It was way too much about me.

My wife and I have moved and are at another parish now.  They don’t have a service without music yet, although the priest has talked about introducing one.  There is resistance from the parish, which is to be expected.  I hope we can try it at some point. I will never stop loving music, and that includes church music.  And, I can certainly enjoy a worship service with music, even if I’m not at all familiar with so many of the songs from the Episcopal tradition.  In a way, that’s a good place to be.  It’s awfully hard to perform a song you don’t know very well.

My Grandmother’s Raunchy Side

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I was raised in a morally-conservative Southern Baptist home.  Most of the cousins that I knew best were all Southern Baptists, as well as many of my friends, mainly because my circle of friends largely came from our church.  Drinking alcohol was a sin, plain and simple.  Dancing was frowned upon but tolerated by the time I was a teenager in the 1970s.  My mother was not fond of playing cards, unless they were game-specific like Old Maids, and much later, Uno.  She was suspicious of regular playing cards because she associated them with gambling, another sin of the infidels.  Most of all, sex was something extremely private and reserved ONLY for the sanctity of marriage — end of discussion.  There was no wiggle room on this point at all.  And it was not a topic of conversation in our home, instructional or otherwise.

My maternal grandmother was also a strong Southern Baptist and beloved by many in our church.  She lived with us through all of my childhood and most of my adolescence.  My mother worked outside the home, so my sister and I were largely raised by our grandmother.  She held many of the same convictions that my mother did; however, there were times that her rural upbringing emerged, sometimes in irreverent ways.  She had some wonderful little “sayings” that verged on being nasty, which made her giggle to the point of losing her breath.  I always thought they were rather inconsistent with our family’s moral code, and I loved them.  Here are a few examples.

If someone in the room exclaimed that somebody “tooted,” she would rattle off this zinger: “The fox is the finder, the stink lays behind her!” Of course, this is an old variation of the later line: “The one who smelt it is the one who dealt it.”  Coming from my sweet grandmother, it was hilarious.  Speaking of farting, she did it quite often in our home and found it to be quite entertaining.

Another even more priceless example to me was what I heard my grandmother say one time when she saw a very tall woman with a very short man.  I will never forget it.  “Well, when they’re nose to nose his toes is in it, and when they’re toes to toes his nose is in it.”  Now that’s mighty raunchy humor coming from a Southern Baptist grandmother in the 1970s.  I have so many more wonderful memories about my grandmother that I intend to document in this blog at some point.  She inspired a song that I wrote and have performed many times, mostly because it has been requested so often, especially by seniors at gatherings where I have entertained.  It never fails to bring laughter, just like my grandmother did for us so many times.