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From: nlt@duke.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: AP Bias or Error?
Message-ID: <5925@duke.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Jun-85 11:58:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: duke.5925
Posted: Wed Jun 12 11:58:17 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Jun-85 01:24:24 EDT
Organization: Duke University
Lines: 42


   Bob Brown posts the following AP news article and asks for comments.
My article is being posted to net.religion.christian only, and I suggest that
any further discussion on the topic be confined to n.r.c, as opposed
to net.religion.

>	MODERATE BAPTISTS MAY BE READY TO DUMP
>		      STANLEY
>
>"The election in Dallas next week will climax a fierce campaign
>launched by moderates who claim Stanley, pastor of First Baptist
>Church in Atlanta, is leading a conservative effort to force its
>ideology - THAT EVERY WORD in the Bible must be interpreted LITER-
>ALLY - on all Southern Baptist agencies and seminaries."

   It is hard to make a judgement based on a single paragraph of text,
but yes, the reporter's statement is misleading.  The issue is not
literal interpretation, but inerrancy.  The conservative position in
the denomination is that every word in the Bible is there because
God wanted it there, and thus every assertion in the Bible is accurate.
(Note that even most conservative thinkers allow for the actual wording
to have been in accordance with the human author's own style of writing.
Very few view the authors as mere dictating machines.)  The "moderate"
position claims a stronger human influence on the writing of the Bible,
stating that since imperfect human beings, living in an imperfect human
culture, with incomplete knowledge, wrote the Bible, some of the biases
and mistaken notions held by these authors and their cultures may have
found their way into Biblical writings.  Nevertheless, the moderates would
say, the Bible was written by men of God and records, as accurately as
possible given the limitations of human knowledge, their experiences
of God.
   It is incorrect to describe conservatives as insisting upon the literal
interpretation of every word in the Bible; any reasonable approach to
reading the Bible will recognize the use of metaphors, figures of speech,
and so forth.

   (For the record, although I am not a Baptist now, I grew up in a Southern
Baptist church and family, and I have been following the moderate-conservative
feud fairly closely.  My own views are close to the "moderate" position
as described above.)

                                     N. L. Tinkham
                                     (duke!nlt)