Issue 033 PDF Version - Christian Ethics Today

This doctrine of soul freedom has immediate, unfiltered
application to Baptist battles. Harold Bloom, America’s best
known literary critic sees “Mullins concept of ‘soul competence’
destroying fundamentalism,” because it “sanctions endless
interpretive possibilities, the weird metaphor of a ‘literal’
or ‘inerrant’ reading totally vaporizes.” Even Karl Barth told
Louie Newton, “How I thank God for Mullins. [He] gave the
world a mighty phrase—the competency of the soul. One cannot
improve on Mullins’ definitions of soul freedom: “The
capacity to deal directly with God.” and “The sinner’s
response to the gospel message [as] an act of moral freedom.”
Religious Liberty
Religious Liberty, the next circle out must follow soul freedom.
It is based on the biblical view of persons. Created
in the image of God, a human being is the crowning work of
God’s creation (bio-centrists notwithstanding). To deny freedom
of conscience to any person is to debase God’s creation.
When anyone’s religious freedom is denied, everyone’s religious
freedom is endangered.
George W. Truett put the concept in Victorian rhetoric
that sounds strange to the ear but rings true to the soul. In his
famous 1920 speech on the steps of the United States Capitol
he said, “The right to private judgment is the crown jewel of
humanity, and for any person or institution to dare to come
between the soul and God is blasphemous impertinence and a
defamation of the crown rights of the Son of God.”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in
1948 recognizes religious liberty as an entitlement of all
human beings, a human right whatever their race or nation.
We claim it as the basic human right, the primary human
right, the ultimate human right. That is so because through
the lenses of religious liberty we know ourselves, come to
understand and value others and try to figure out the world.
George Jellinek argued convincingly that “freedom of conscience
may be the oldest Right of Man, at any rate it is the
most basic Right of Man (pre-gender free language) because it
comprises all ethically conditioned action and guarantees freedom
from compulsion, especially from the power of the state.”
Religious liberty then as the basic human right is universal in
4 • APRIL 2001 • CHRISTIAN ETHICS TODAY
its appeal and application.
The late James Ralph Scales of Wake Forest University
stressed the universal and inviolable nature of religious liberty
as the basis for church-state separation. He wrote in 1976 that
religious liberty is “as nearly absolute as any safeguarded by the
constitutions or practiced as a natural right.”
For Bloom, consequences lie far beyond Baptists or religion
or even “political, socioeconomic and anthropological
implications” if religious liberty is neglected. That liberty “was
also the stance of John Milton and Roger Williams…if that
vision abandons the United States forever, then more than our
spiritual democracy will yet be threatened.”
Robert Torbet also linked religious liberty directly with
church-state separation. He saw “an emphasis upon the accessibility
of God to all men [and women] and the free responsibility
of each individual before God, hence a free church in a
free state.”
Separation of Church and State
This last of our irreplaceable circles coming off a pebble in
a pond or a shock-sending earthquake is in separation of
church and state. It is an organic part of core Baptist belief, an
appendage which if amputated would bleed dry the Baptist
life blood.
Only last Friday the Executive of an American Baptist
State Convention told me about a layman who lamented,
“Why we did not just quit worrying about Baptist doctrines
and be Christians?” She asked, “like which doctrine?” and he
replied, “like the doctrine of church-state separation.”
There are many possible explanations to this sort of misunderstanding
of church-state separation. The doctrine has been
so distorted, diminished and deprecated that it’s easy to see
how one could arrive at that point. Yet, it’s not just a Baptist
doctrine, separation of church and state is an indissoluble
aspect of our take on the essence of Christian faith.
True, separation of church and state does not define
Baptist theology but it is a logical, inextricable inevitable
corollary of religious liberty as we know it. It is the plug which
if pulled out of our machine, the motor dies. We go no more.
So when anyone says, “Oh, I’m all for religious liberty but