I’ve read and re-read this article. It’s actually from quite awhile ago - I’m sorry that I’m just now taking time to post some of it here. Timothy George is brilliant - he holds a Doctorate in Theology from Harvard. I love his writings, his positions, and how he argues and articulates them. This is what we need more of in recovering tradition in the SBC, and evangelicalism at large. D.H. Williams and Steve Harmon are correct. Read this section of George’s article. If you want more commentary of the full lecture, presented at a Baptist Identity Conference, you can read it here at: “The Future of Baptist Identity in a Post-Denominational World, or, ‘Is Jesus a Baptist’?” Or, you can listen to the audio lecture in its entirety online by clicking the link here from the Baptist Identity Conference II, held at Union University - session X - click the audio link.
Retrieval for the sake of Renewal

When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, one of my professors, Harvey Cox, like me a former Baptist youth evangelist, published a book entitled Turning East.

Harvey was then in his post-Secular City, pre-Pentecostal phase and was much enamored with Buddhism and spiritualities of the East. In that book he argued for what he called the “principle of genealogical selectivity.” In trying to work out a viable spirituality today, he said, “there are two principal historical sources to which we should look. They are the earliest period of our history and the most recent, the first Christian generations and the generation just before us….The ransacking of other periods for help in working out a contemporary spirituality is either antiquarian or downright misleading.” Did you get that dialectic? Primitivism on the one hand (the first Christian generation), and presentism on the other (the most recent generation, my generation). This is the heresy of contemporaneity and it undergirds much of the liberalism and individualism that marks not only left of center theologians like Harvey Cox, but wide swaths of Baptist and evangelical life as well.
Against this “imperialism of the present” (as I have called it) and the ideology of self-importance that undergirds it comes the call for a Baptist retrieval of the Christian heritage as a source of renewal for the life of the church today. Retrieval for the sake of renewal—that was exactly the program of the Reformation. Ad fontes—back to the sources—was their motto. This was not a call to leapfrog over the intervening centuries back to some mythical, non-existent pristine New Testament church as though Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Athanasius, and Irenaeus had never lived, as though the fathers of Nicea and Chalcedon had never struggled with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity or the person of Jesus Christ. No, what they were about, and what the English Baptists of the seventeenth century, both Generals and Particulars, were about was a critical appropriation of the Christian tradition ever subjecting itself, and themselves, to the normative authority of the written word of God. This is why the framers of the Second London Confession of 1689 identified themselves with what they called “that wholesome Protestant theology” of the Reformation, and why the framers of An Orthodox Creed, a General Baptist confession of 1679, included the full text of the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed in their statement of faith. They declared that all three of these historic documents “ought thoroughly to be received and believed…for they may be proved by most undoubted authority of Holy Scripture and are necessary to be understood of all Christians.” These were Baptists, mind you. This is retrieval for the sake of renewal.
Understanding our heritage will help us deal constructively with the issues and controversies we face today. This kind of retrieval will help us to place in perspective some of the questions that still generate more heat than light within our own Southern Baptist fellowship such as: 1) Are Baptists a creedal people?, and 2) Are Baptist Calvinists? Let’s look briefly at each one of these.
Are Baptists a creedal people? “No creed but the Bible” was a slogan of the Campbellite movement in the nineteenth century and it has become axiomatic in many circles as a marker of Baptist identity today. Yet prior to the twentieth century, most Baptist theologians from Andrew Fuller to E. Y. Mullins, spoke very affirmingly of “the Baptist creed.” They strongly rejected the idea that voluntary, conscientious adherence to an explicit doctrinal standard was somehow foreign to the Baptist tradition.
It is nonetheless true that Baptists have never advocated creedalism. In two very important senses Baptists are not, and never have been, a creedal people, that is, a creedalist people. First, Baptists of all theological persuasions have been ardent supporters of religious liberty, opposing sometimes to the point of persecution, imprisonment, and all kinds of degradations, state-imposed religious conformity, and the attendant civil sanctions associated therewith. Believing that God alone is the Lord of the conscience, Baptists deny that civil magistrates have any legitimate authority to regulate or coerce the internal religious life of voluntary associations, including churches.
Second, Baptists are not creedalist in that they have never agreed that any humanly constructed doctrinal statement should be elevated to a par with Holy Scripture, much less placed above it. As Baptist confessions themselves invariably declare, the Bible alone remains the norma normans for all teaching and instruction, “the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried.” Unlike Eastern Orthodoxy which elevates the conciliar decisions of the first seven ecumenical councils to an infallible status, and the Roman Catholic Church which does the same thing with all twenty-three ecumenical councils, as they count them, including Vatican II, Baptists have never “canonized” any of their confessions. Rather we have held them all to be revisable in the light of the Bible, God’s infallible, unchanging revelation.
It must also be admitted that within the Baptist family there is a minority report on confessions, a libertarian tradition represented in colonial America by John Leland who rejected the use of the Philadelphia Confession of Faith by saying, “We need no such Virgin Mary to come between us and God.” Yet when such a confession became a means of uniting the Regular and Separate Baptist of Virginia, even John Leland, perhaps the most anti-confessional Baptist in colonial America, could allow the usefulness of such a document so long as such a statement was not placed on the level of the Bible nor “sacredized” by those who adopted it.
Still, for all of their value, confessions must be used with great wisdom and care. Confessionalism, like creedalism and traditionalism, can stultify and choke as well as undergird and defend. When matters of secondary and tertiary importance are elevated to a level of primary significance, and placed right next to the doctrine of the Trinity or justification by faith alone, then we are veering away from orthodoxy to orthodoxism, from tradition, which Jaraslov Pelikan famously defined as the living faith of the dead, to traditionalism, which is the dead faith of the living. Retrieval can lead to reversal as well as to renewal. If the Baptist Faith and Message becomes a grab bag for every problem or issue that comes on to the horizon, then it will cease to be a consensual statement of Baptist conviction. S. M. Noel, a Kentucky Baptist of the nineteenth century, has words of wisdom for us here. Our confession, he said, “should be large enough to meet the exigencies of the church by preserving her while in the wilderness, exposed to trials, in peace, purity, and loyalty. And it should be small enough to find a lodgment in the heart of the weakest lamb, sound in the faith.”