John Wilsey: Defending scripture and missions

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, April 25th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Last week, Southern Baptist pastor and writer Charles Stanley passed away. He was the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Atlanta for 49 years, and his sermons were broadcasted widely. His life was not without controversy, given that he divorced his wife Anna in 1993 after 45 years of marriage and a year of separation. But less than a decade earlier, Stanley served as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention during a time when commitment to the trustworthiness of God’s word was on the decline.

WORLD Commentator John Wilsey is a professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and today he reflects on what Stanley did to address this move away from believing in inerrancy.

JOHN WILSEY, COMMENTATOR: The world lost a truly great man last week. For 76 years, this man was devoted to preaching and teaching the gospel message based on the authority of the Bible. His name was Charles Stanley.

Southern Baptists have the distinction of being the only major Protestant denomination to arrest a theologically leftward drift and recover a shared commitment to inerrancy without compromising Christ’s command to evangelize the world. At the beginning of the 20th century, liberal theology that emphasized the moral teachings of Christ over historic orthodox doctrines began to make headway among Southern Baptists.

By mid-century, neo-orthodoxy, which emphasized subjective experience over Biblical inerrancy, was also becoming mainstream. And by the 1970s, Protestant liberalism and neo-orthodoxy had become prominent in seminary classrooms. As the 1980s opened, the lines were drawn between Southern Baptist moderates who rejected the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture and conservatives who embraced inerrancy.

The moderates wanted a compromise. They wanted to allow for theological diversity, even to the point of rejecting the substitutionary view of the atonement along with the inerrancy of Scripture to focus on the Great Commission. The conservatives were unwilling to make this compromise. One of the great champions of that conservative commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture was Charles Stanley.

Stanley was born in Dry Fork, Va. He was called to preach as a teenager and served churches in North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. He then became pastor of the historic First Baptist Church Atlanta in 1971 and began a television ministry to local audiences. By 1978, Stanley’s sermons were being shown all over the country.

During the controversy over Biblical truth and authority in the Southern Baptist Convention, the moderates argued that inerrancy was a recent invention of conservatives.

Stanley was one of the most persuasive preachers who countered the moderate argument. He showed that Baptists, going back to their roots in early 17th century England, had always believed the Bible was without error; that the ideas and the words contained in Scripture originated in the mind of God; that God sovereignly inspired the human authors to compose the words of Scripture; and that the Bible alone was authoritative for faith and practice. Because of those great truths, there was no false choice between theological orthodoxy on the one hand and missions and evangelism on the other.

Stanley conveyed in his preaching that when churches believe the Bible as God’s Word, the people of the churches do not have to be cajoled into obedience. Obedience is a joy to those who believe.

Stanley encouraged his audiences through a monthly column on his ministry’s website. He wrote a final exhortation at the beginning of April. Titled “Gain a Deep Appreciation for Jesus’ Sacrifice,” no letter could be more fitting as his last than this one. It is a simple gospel message, focused on Jesus as He died on the cross as our substitute. “His work on our behalf is once and for all,” he wrote. “And as a result, our salvation can never be lost.”

I’m John Wilsey.

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