James White has done it again.
Dr. White likes to speak about being gracious
and charitable but he only means to Catholics, Mormons and Muslims. To fellow Christians, and especially to fellow Baptists, he can be mean spirited, harsh
and sometimes even hateful.
In a recent Dividing Line[1] program entitled “Dogmatic Secularism Rises; the Politics of
the Southern Baptist Convention”[2]
at about minute 39, White takes off on a message by Dr. Paige Patterson given at
a college Chapel service. Patterson was addressing the issue of Calvinism within
the Southern Baptist Convention and remarks that it belongs in Presbyterian
churches, not Baptist. In his statements, Patterson links Baptists to
Anabaptists, the Apostles and John the Baptist. It was at this point that White
mockingly says, “You ain’t been reading the Trail of Blood again have you?”[3]
From there he says there are many books that debunk the Anabaptist connection
to modern Baptists.
Yes, Dr. White, and there are many that affirm
it too.
Here’s the thing, on almost any given subject
a person can find material to either support or deny any given position. Which
material we tend to gravitate to depends largely upon one’s leaning. White
confesses his own training was in schools where he was the “token
Fundamentalist.” It is obvious that before he finished his education there was
very little of Fundamentalism left. The influences in his life, together with
his desire to be seen as an academic, has pulled him toward those positions that
are the most widely accepted among his chosen group of peers, the Reformed.
Nothing concerning the Anabaptist lineage has
been debunked. Writers, who lean toward Protestantism, reference books that
keep church history in the Catholic line. Writers who see the error of Catholicism
(and thus, Protestantism) reference works (generally much older ones) that
maintain the gates of hell never prevailed against God’s churches as they did
in Catholicism and then Protestantism.
Marvin McKenzie
In the fields
