Kierkegaard and Zealots

I have argued for some months now that the Southern Baptist Convention has for many years been in a typical dead period. The decreasing quantitative numbers of Baptisms over the past twenty-five years, the heated arguments over peripheral issues, the need for symbiotic relationships to faster growing movements, the centralization and consolidation of power, the limiting of women’s roles, all these factors by themselves do not necessarily suggest a spiritual dead period, but, in aggregate, they affirm the strong possibility that we are not growing spiritually as a body of believers.

Neo-fundamentalism is much to blame for our present condition but not exclusively. Like all dead periods, every component, every faction, of the body bears responsibility for the circumstances of the body. Nevertheless, the neo-fundamentalist do bear much if not most of the culpability because they have been in the leadership position of the convention for all of the past quarter century and have organized and driven much of the circumstances of the past half century that has led to our current predicament.

I indeed intend to elaborate upon my position in the coming weeks. Until that time, let me leave with you with two quotes. The first quote by Soren Kierkegaard establishes that he was quite orthodox unlike the theological liberals that he apposed. The second quote by Kierkegaard is his explanation of the fundamentalists of his time.

“These books [i.e. the Bible] belong to the canon, and no others; they are authentic, are complete, the authors are trustworthy – one can well say that it is as if every letter were inspired (and more than this one cannot say, for inspiration is an object of faith, it is qualitatively dialectical, not to be reached by quantitative approach). Besides, there is not a trace of contradiction in the sacred books.”

“Zealotism of the letter, though it possessed passion, is a thing that has vanished. It was meritorious for the fact that it had passion. In another sense it was comic, and just as the age of chivalry really ended with Don Quixote (for the comic interpretation is always the final one), so might a poet even now make it manifest that the age of the theology of the letter is past, by immortalizing in comedy such an unfortunate servant of the letter in his tragic-comic romanticism.”