"Why I Left the Fundamentalist Baptist Movement"

by P. Andrew Sandlin
July 19, 2000

For approximately the first twenty years of my life, I was an independent, Fundamentalist Baptist. People have asked why I no longer hold this view. In this brief essay, I will attempt to explain the main reasons why.

I should mention initially that the Fundamentalist Baptist Movement (hereafter FBM) is not monolithic; there is a great deal of diversity within it. Certain descriptions and criticisms I make of the FBM will surely not apply to everybody within it. There is, however, sufficient heterogeneity within the movement to classify it as a movement with certain identifiable characteristics. I will do my best to represent those characteristics accurately as I remember them.

Further, it is entirely possible that this movement has changed since I left it. I maintain little contact with the movement and its principal figures, churches, writings, and so forth. This essay is an explanation of why I left the movement; it is not chiefly a critique of that movement, particularly as it exists today. I am not attempting to document Biblical, theological and historical reasons for my departure, but simply relate and explain them. I am not trying to incite a debate, and I do not intend to engage in one. Nor am I endeavoring to proselytize for the Reformed faith, the theology and movement in which I presently find a happy home. This essay is simply a slice of religious autobiography. It professes to be nothing else.

Definition

What is the FBM? It is a comparatively large sector of fundamentalist Christianity limited largely to the United States. It seems to me that it owes much of its genesis, from a human standpoint, to the colorful and controversial Baptist minister J. Frank Norris, pastor of two huge churches, one in Ft. Worth, TX and one in Detroit, MI, earlier this century. He was a Southern Baptist who left the Southern Baptist denomination because he believed it had deviated from Biblical truth and the Baptist Faith (he was largely correct in this assessment). Almost everybody of any note in the FBM was influenced by him directly or indirectly (those in the GARB, the General Association of Regular Baptists, are an exception, coming from a different ecclesiastical stream). John R. Rice, Jack Hyles, Dallas Billington, Harold Henniger, G. B. Vick, Noel Smith, Raymond Barber and many others bear the distinct marks of Norris' influence. Chief periodicals of this movement have been The Sword of the Lord and The Biblical Evangelist. John Rice started The Sword of the Lord, and Robert Sumner started and still edits The Biblical Evangelist. Both of these men, along with Jack Hyles, have written most of the principal books that have influenced the FBM over the last thirty or forty years.

I should mention something about Bob Jones University and similar schools. Only in the last few decades have these non-denominational schools come to be identified with the FBM. BJU was started by a Methodist evangelist, Bob Jones, Sr.; and his son, Bob Jones, Jr., did not possess what most Fundamentalist Baptists considered sound Baptist credentials. Bob Jones III, the current president, seems more Baptistic. Schools like Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College appeal largely, but not exclusively, to the FBM, and they operate generally within its ambit, though by no means at its center. Most of the FBM consider them, at best, shaky allies.

Favorable Characteristics

Biblical authority. Before I mention the reasons I left this movement, it is only fair to commend its most favorable characteristics. First, the FBM embraces a high view of formal Biblical authority. It holds that the Bible is the inspired and infallible Word of God. This is its anchoring conviction; and while I believe the FBM often misunderstands the content of the Bible's revelation and, thus, undercuts the Bible's authority, I am grateful that this movement bequeathed to me an undying love for and affirmation of the Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God.

Absolute truth. Second, this belief in the Bible as an infallible authority naturally leads to an unwavering affirmation of the absolute character of truth. In an age of ideological and moral relativism, the FBM stands without compromise for an absolute right and wrong. It does not mince words about sin, however it is defined. Amid the shifting ideas and fashions of the modern world, the FBM tries hard to embrace the unchanging truth of the Bible.

Evangelism and missions. Third, the FBM is intensely evangelistic, both in domestic and foreign missions. It strongly emphasizes soul winning, many baptisms, growing churches, and so forth. These people are genuinely concerned about lost souls, and many of them do everything in their power to get those souls saved. They believe in worldwide evangelism and give generously to foreign missions.

Despite these creditable traits, I felt obliged to leave this movement. Why?

Theological Reasons

Wrong emphasis. I became convinced that the main emphasis of the FBM was erroneous. To me that emphasis seemed to be soul winning and church building. This really was the centerpiece of the ministry of men like J. Frank Norris, John R. Rice, and Jack Hyles; and they influenced thousands in this emphasis. One troubling fact I noticed quite early was that the majority - perhaps the vast majority - of those supposedly converted and joined to their churches soon abandoned their profession, often within a few months or a couple of years. I suspected that an orientation of Christianity that had difficulty retaining a large number of its converts was off track somewhere. I came to believe that this was a principal problem, notably a denial of the sovereignty of God and Jesus Christ's Lordship in the gospel. This was about the time the so-called "Lordship Salvation" controversy was rearing its head, and I found the arguments of supporters like R. J. Rushdoony, A. W. Tozer, and John MacArthur irrefutable. They supplied a good answer as to why so many supposed converts in the FBM (and elsewhere) so quickly abandoned the Faith: the gospel the FBM preaches is a somewhat defective gospel. Most of the FBM loudly criticized the proponents of Lordship Salvation, claiming the latter denied salvation by grace alone. The proponents of Lordship Salvation believed that in accepting Christ by faith as one's Savior, he equally accepted him as Lord and Master of his life. The FBM contended that this polluted salvation by grace.

I soon came to recognize that this criticism contained a highly ironic feature: while the FBM constantly stresses salvation by grace, its gospel really is not a gracious gospel. As I investigated soteriology (salvation doctrine), I was astounded to discover that on certain key points, FBM soteriology was similar to that of Roman Catholicism, one of the FBM's great enemies. For example, Rome is a strong advocate of "free will" in salvation, of synergism (man's cooperating with God), and, in general, of a prominent role of man in his own salvation. To me, this undercut salvation by grace through faith, which the FBM formally confirmed (one of them recently sent me an essay he had written titled, "The Sovereignty of Man"!). I came to believe that God saves men; He does not help them save themselves. This was at wide variance from the FBM's soteriology.

Chiefly, the issue was a God-centered or a man-centered faith. It was here that my father's passion and dedication to the glorification of God helped lead me away from the FBM, though he was still fully a member of it (he has been a Bible-believing Baptist pastor for mover 40 years). He always believed that our life should be about glorifying God; worshipping Him; loving Him with all our heart, soul, strength, might, and mind; and so on. I concluded that this emphasis was the correct Christian emphasis and that it strongly conflicted with the emphasis of the FBM. The FBM was primarily about saving souls and building churches. Biblical Christianity, however, is primarily about glorifying God and enjoying Him forever (Question 1 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism). If I had to choose between glorifying God and glorifying man, there was really no choice. I had to glorify God. Therefore, I felt I needed to leave the FBM.

Wrong interpretation. Second, I became increasingly convinced that the FBM was wrong in its basic interpretation of the Bible. Most members of the FBM carried Scofield Reference Bibles; and while many of them may not have been quite as dispensationalist as Scofield himself, all (or almost all) posited a firm distinction between Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church. This is the sine qua non and fundamental tenet of dispensationalism. I do not believe the FBM intends intentionally to degrade the Old Testament; but it does, at least in practice, neglect it. The FBM speaks a great deal about "New Testament Christians," "New Testament Christianity," and "New Testament churches." Except for detecting fanciful types of New Testament teachings, the Old Testament is not a part of their theology. I concluded that this dispensational interpretation wreaked havoc on their high view of formal Biblical authority, or, more specifically, their formal view of high Biblical authority was not accompanied by a consistently material view of high Biblical authority. In simple terms, they believe the Bible is the Word of God, but their method of interpreting it does not permit that belief.

Most members of the FBM are dispensational premillennialists, or at least premillennialists with a somewhat dispensational orientation. I became increasingly convinced that texts like Acts 2 identified the Davidic kingdom of the Old Testament with the present reign of Jesus Christ at the right hand of His Father. This, of course, had been the predominant view throughout the history of the church - it is today termed amillennialism or else postmillennialism. The FBM placed undue emphasis on eschatology, in my view. I discovered that this was at variance with what most Christians historically have believed. They were content to affirm the future physical second coming, resurrection of the just and the unjust, final judgment, and the eternal state of heaven and hell without finalizing all the details, most of which are simply the result of unhealthy human speculation. To the FBM, their eschatology was a criterion of orthodoxy and fellowship.

Wrong ethics. Third, my recovery of the Old Testament as authoritative in today's church and world reinforced my increasingly strong belief that the FBM was, to a certain degree, antinomian or "anti-law." R. J. Rushdoony first alerted me to the fact that whenever man abandoned God's written law in the Bible, they, like the Pharisees of old, always substitute their own man-made law. This is precisely what I found in the FBM. For example, they tended to prohibit all sorts of things the Bible said nothing about - or in some cases encouraged - like moderate consumption of alcohol, movie attendance, television viewing, women's wearing slacks, listening to contemporary music, and so forth. On the other hand, they neglected unambiguous Biblical requirements: for example, the Christian civil magistrate's enforcement of the Biblical civil law. It was a simple case of adding requirements that were not there, while omitting requirements that were there. Pastors' using guilt manipulation to force their congregation into accepting these distortions of the Biblical faith aggravated this. There was a great deal of talk about being "Spirit-led," and, of course, there is nothing whatever wrong with this. But this alleged "Spirit-leadership" often occurred at the expense of what the Bible actually taught. Where the Bible did not speak or apply some teaching, the FMB was not content to leave this to the believer's discretion, but thought it necessary to create an ecclesiastical law system that, functionally at least, they set on a par with the Bible itself. They often did this by appeal to "pastoral authority," this "prophetic" authority somehow supernaturally granted to the local church's pastor (more on this below).

Wrong eschatology. Fourth, I became gradually disenchanted with the defeatism, which this distorted interpretation fostered. This is true of almost all dispensationalists, and it was surely true of almost all of the FBM - history is getting worse and worse, the church is becoming more and more apostate, and we can hope only to save a few souls before the pretribulational rapture. I became convinced of the older Puritan vision of postmillennial eschatology: that Christ would return after, not before, the great era of gospel victory which both the Old Testament prophets and John in the Apocalypse foretold. The idea of "victory" in the FBM is limited to personal victory over sin or, at the most, the victory of a number of souls saved within the church. As far as the surrounding culture in the world is concerned, we were taught to expect nothing but defeat. I found this acutely depressing, and I acknowledge that I scouted around for a more optimistic way. I found it in postmillennialism.

This brings up an important issue. Theological shifts like mine are not made exclusively for theological reasons. I will refer to a few psychological reasons for my shift (note the section below, "Non-Theological Reasons"). The eminently depressing forecast of FBM eschatology as it relates to both the world and the church did not sit well with me. Critics may charge, therefore, that my refutation of the dispensationalism of the FBM was merely wishful thinking. Frankly, however, the more I examined the Biblical evidence, the more I found that it tended to support postmillennialism. In his deeply insightful work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that "paradigm shifts" in science never originate from new evidence, but from new ways of looking at the evidence. Why do people look at the evidence in new and different ways? There are many answers to that question, perhaps as many answers as there are people who look at the evidence. One conclusion from Kuhn's thesis is that no matter what may be the motivation of the development of new paradigms, if the evidence more accurately fits a new model, that model is valid - at least more valid than the one it replaced. This, in my view, is certainly true of my adoption of postmillennialism, as well as my adoption of the Reformed Faith in general.

Wrong covenantalism. Fifth, my adoption of the unity of the Bible's two Testaments forced me to take covenant theology seriously. This meant getting rid of professors' baptism and adopting covenant baptism, including infant baptism. I was actually prepared for this by my father, who, while opposing infant baptism, strongly emphasized household salvation, salvation at a very young age, and training households up in the Faith. He led me to Christ when I was very young - two or three years old. He baptized me by immersion upon my profession of faith. Some of the FBM would be highly critical of this, but that does not seem to bother him. I was trained in a profoundly Christian home, and I knew that this way was far superior to the "adult conversionist" way on which so much of the FBM was based. Only later did I understand that children's conversion is the Biblical rule and adult conversion is the exception. The FBM generally reverses this. By doing this, it seems that, by implication at least, they fall into the trap of suggesting that one continue in sin that grace may abound. They would never intend this, of course, but their denial of covenant theology tends to lead to this consequence. Real conversions occur when people become adults. To me, this is virtually to throw their children to the wolves.

More importantly, it seems clear that if one accepted the unity of the Old and New Testaments, he could hardly suggest that in the Old Testament administration, God included in the church children of believing parents, but in the New Testament era He cast those children away from His covenant care (John Calvin employed this argument in his defense of infant baptism). If anything, the message of New Testament salvation was wider than that of the Old Testament. Acting on Colossians 2 and other texts, I became convinced that baptism had replaced circumcision as an external mark of the covenant of grace. This is an issue that the FBM could never concede, because the entire edifice of the FBM is built on the foundation of adult-only conversions. This is a crucial point to recognize. The issue is not so much baptism; it is the all-embracing notion of adult conversion. To adopt covenant theology is by that very fact to abandon the FBM.

Wrong history. Sixth, I quickly discovered when I began to read intensely that the FBM had a woefully inadequate approach to history, particularly church history. Many of its supporters held to the "trail of blood" thesis, that true, Bible-believing Baptists enjoyed great precedent all the way back to the early church and John the Baptist himself. Interestingly, however, many of the groups claimed by the FBM or by almost anybody's standards - including many of the FBM today - are heretical. I refer to the Novations, the Albigenses, the Cathari, the Anabaptists, and so forth. The Anabaptists, for instance, had no doctrine of justification by faith alone, and were intently pacifists (see Robert Friedmann's The Theology of Anabaptism; the author was a devout Anabaptist). By contrast, most of the FBM strongly emphasized justification by faith alone, and were United States patriots of the highest order. And the Anabaptists were probably the least heretical of the various groups claimed by the "trail of blood" thesis. The FBM seemed to glory in always being outside the established Christian church, and notably the Church of Rome. This opposition to Romanism is most commendable, but the FBM apparently did not recognize that the doctrines of the very groups they hailed as theological predecessors were in no case less egregious and in some cases more egregious than those of the Church of Rome.

Actually, however, it seemed that most of the FBM simply did not take history seriously at all. They believed they could simply reproduce "New Testament Christianity" in the world today. This is a form of "primitivism." We can reproduce the Christianity of 2000 years ago without any recourse to the last 2000 years. I came to see this as highly arrogant and foolish. It partook of the sect mentality. Because of this, it denied any place for historic orthodoxy. Of course, in denying any place for orthodoxy and its creeds and confessions, the FBM countered with its own orthodoxy and creedalism and confessionalism, even when it denied this. It did not recognize that orthodoxy is an inescapable concept. It did not grasp that every explicit denial of Christian orthodoxy on the grounds of fidelity to the Bible alone is an implicit affirmation of a new - and often heretical -orthodoxy (i.e., heterodoxy). I am not claiming that the FBM, as a whole, embraced clearly heretical doctrines. Almost all of its members, to my knowledge, are Trinitarian, and hold an orthodox, if often naive, Christology. But they do this by assuming they simply read their own Bibles, not recognizing that the interpretation of the orthodox church of the first 500 years has been handed down to them as sacred trust. This, too, I considered a form of gross arrogance, not to mention ignorance.

One central Christian doctrine, however, that many FBM members did not seem to hold was the doctrine of original sin. Many of them, at least those whom I encountered, seemed to believe that man was born innocent and did not become responsible for sin until the so-called "age of accountability." I could not find this doctrine in the Bible. More importantly, they seemed to hold that all babies who died before hearing the gospel went to heaven; they were not saved, but they were "safe." In other words, they believed certain individuals could go to heaven without trusting in Christ. I could not find this doctrine in the Bible, and I came to believe that the orthodox Christian doctrine of original sin was not one the FBM understood or took seriously.

Wrong worldview. Seventh, I became convinced that the outlook of the FBM could not make sense of the world. It simply was not a comprehensive "worldview." It could make sense of private, individual faith and, perhaps, church life on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday prayer meetings; but it could not make sense of the world at large - culture, education, the arts, vocation, politics, and so on. Its eschatological orientation, I believe, demanded this glaring omission: the present culture is under the control of the Devil, and we know that things are only going to get worse and worse; anyway, we are not to be interested in this world except to get a few souls to Jesus; our only real concern should be to get ready for heaven. This inherently retreatist agenda simply refused to take seriously the world in which God has placed us. It neglected creation by insisting only on redemption - a very narrow, truncated redemption at that.

Of all the sectors of orthodox Christianity, none stressed the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all of life like the Reformed Faith. From Calvin to the English and the New England Puritans to Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til and Francis Schaeffer and Rousas John Rushdoony, all of the proponents of a Bible-believing cultural reclamation were Calvinists. The FBM does not believe in cultural reclamation in any sense; and if it adopted this view, it would be necessary to transform its entire movement. In Niebuhr's paradigm (in his book Christ and Culture), they adopt the "Christ Against Culture" view. The Calvinists affirm the "Christ the Transformer of Culture" view. I came to believe the latter was the right view. I came to believe that the FBM surrendered vast areas of life and culture to the Devil, while the historic, Reformed view, particularly Chalcedon's position, worked relentlessly to bring all areas under Jesus Christ's authority. In other words, I believed the FBM had denied the Lordship of Christ under the guise of concern for souls. For me, it was not concern for souls that should come first, but the glory of God; and this glory of God demands Christ's Lordship in the earth.

Non-Theological Reasons

Scholarship. You don't on merely theological grounds abandon a theological movement in which you were reared and participated for twenty years. There are usually other grounds. There certainly were in my case. One of the main ones was the hostility toward scholarship. I was aware at a relatively young age of my intellectual capacity and scholarly interest but I found no haven for these in the FBM. All to the contrary, I found indifference and, in many cases, active hostility. In contrast to the great movements in the Christian church over the last 2000 years, the FBM is almost totally bereft of sound scholarship. Note carefully that I did not say that it was bereft of intelligent people. It certainly has these. What it does not have is a concrete commitment to scholarship. This is only natural, because the centerpiece of the FBM program is soul winning and church building, not scholarship, which requires contemplation and the cultivation of the mind. This is not easy when you are committed almost exclusively to soul winning and church building.

Besides, the FBM holds that scholarship is dangerous - it tends to equate it with liberalism and new evangelicalism. The fact that the greatest scholarship of the medieval world and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was devoutly Christian does not enter into the equation, probably because these Christian scholars were not Baptists. But even Baptist scholars from previous centuries are ignored or discounted: John Gill and Augustus Strong, for example. Both, incidentally, were Calvinists. When I began seriously to investigate the issues of church history, the development of doctrine and dogma, theories of knowledge, apologetics, exegesis, and so on, I found the FBM had produced almost nothing on these topics. I found myself appealing to conservative, Bible-believing works of scholarship from other sectors of the church. If I had any scholarly aspirations whatever, I thought, I wouldn't be able to cultivate them within the FBM ambit. To be fair, there was a certain level of "common sense" scholarship at Bob Jones University, the closest thing to a haven for FBM scholarship. The scholarship there, however, was hardly creative and culturally relevant and, in any case, it compromised the Bible and the sovereignty of God, in my opinion. Reverent scholarship was simply not a part of the FBM program; and if I were to be a scholar of any sort, I couldn't be on in the FBM.

Historicity. The second non-theological reason for my departure from the FBM is somewhat philosophical and sophisticated, but I really do need to mention it. It relates to historicity. When philosophically astute readers first hear this, they may think that this involves a concession to a form of "modernism" originating with philosophers like Martin Heidegger. But this is not true. The idea that our ideas and beliefs - including our Christian beliefs - are conditioned by our character and by our historic circumstances I first learned from the outstanding Reformed apologist Cornelius Van Til. Van Til relied on the Bible in dividing all of humanity into covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. He held that the main difference between men was not metaphysical, but ethical. Unbelievers cannot believe, not because they are constitutionally impaired, but because they are ethically impaired. They are sinners, and their sinfulness is noetic; it involves their knowledge. They suppress the truth of God in their minds and, therefore, cannot believe, apart from regeneration. In other words, their reason is instrumental, not ultimate. Their reason is an instrument of their sinful nature, just as the reason of believers is an instrument of their redeemed nature. There is, therefore, no neutrality in the sphere of knowledge (epistemology). This means that man is conditioned at the most basic level by his religious condition.

Van Til did not deny, however, that man is also conditioned by his metaphysical state - in this case, the fact that he is finite. Man is not God and man does not possess God's knowledge. Therefore, all of his theological constructions are bound by his finitude. They cannot be reproductions of the truth as it exists in God's mind. This does not lead to theological skepticism, since man can have an accurate creaturely knowledge of God and His revelation. It does mean, however, that the word of man, however accurate, can never constitute the unvarnished authority of the Word of God. It means that no human theological system - even the most accurate ones like the Reformed system - can be absolute.

But an absolute theological system is what the FBM is largely about. In fact, its operating assumption is that right belief about the Bible necessarily equals right Biblical beliefs. In other words, because its members believe the Bible is the infallible Word of God, they believe their views about the Bible (e.g., church growth, baptism, soul winning, and so on) are infallible. To question the distinctives of the FBM is to question the Bible. This conviction is possible only when one presupposes that human theological systems partake of an absolute character.

A friend who also left the FBM once asked me, "What is the first angle you take in trying to dissuade someone from the FBM?" I responded: to get them to recognize that a high view of formal Biblical authority does not guarantee accurate beliefs. The Bible must be properly understood and interpreted. In other words, I would ask the members of the FBM to re-examine their particular distinctives in light of what the Bible actually teaches, recognizing that their mind does not infallibly reproduce the knowledge in God's mind simply because they believe the Bible is infallible.

The issue of historicity goes even deeper. Certain beliefs and practices of the FBM arose as a result of specific circumstances. Because they do not understand this, they tend to equate these beliefs and practices with absolute Biblical truth. A prime example is the "altar call," without which it would be difficult for the FBM to exist. Yet, as John Williamson Nevin pointed out in the nineteenth century, this practice arose largely among the revivalists and had no historic precedent whatsoever. It resulted from a distinctly altered view in the Calvinistic conception of salvation, and it was adopted by many of the "New School" adherents. They were the "modernists" of the day. Oddly, members of the FBM now criticize as innovators those Bible-believing conservatives who refuse to practice the "altar call." Actually, the opposite is true. It is the FBM that is "modernistic" on this point - and many others. When a movement lacks any extensive awareness of both church history and historicity, it will identify its own beliefs and practices as Biblical absolutes. With the FBM, the same is true of the pretribulational rapture theory, the Sunday school, clothing standards, and so on. An extensive knowledge of history emancipates one from the tyranny of the present. But the FBM is subject to the tyranny of the present (or more accurately, the recent past) because it lacks any substantive historical awareness.

Authority. Of the non-theological factors that impelled my departure from the FBM, none was more significant than its bizarre and dangerous view of "authority." Its profession was that the Scriptures "are the final authority," but within the church, this ordinarily translated into "the pastor is the final authority, not only in Scriptural interpretation, but the interpretation of virtually all of life." The Roman Catholics hold that the infallible Scriptures requires an infallible interpreter and, to a large degree, the FBM agrees with this, holding, at least in practice, that this role is to be occupied by the local church pastor. This is why there is such an emphasis on "pastoral authority." The pastor is a "man of God," implying that almost no other men in the congregation are. He regularly "hears from heaven," not necessarily in a charismatic "prophetic" sense, but nonetheless in such a way that he is able to govern the minutia of his members' lives. There is no plurality of leadership in FBM churches, and the deacons are there usually to handle financial matters. Most (but by no means all) pastors in the FBM tend to berate their congregation for wearing the improper clothing, not giving enough in the church offering, not spending enough hours praying and on church soul winning, and so forth. They then have protracted altar calls, which I came to believe served as the FBM's sacrament of penance. There was a decidedly sadistic-masochistic element: the pastors loved to berate the congregation, and the congregation enjoyed being berated because it gave them a feeling of catharsis. I was jolted when one church member said to me, "Pastor, I used to hate you because you did not tell us everything we were supposed to do." In other words, she was saying that because I did not lay down rules to dominate her every action, but rather granted the freedom that the Bible itself granted, she hated me. She hated the freedom God grants and preferred the slavery man imposes. I found this to be pervasive within the FBM.

I came to adopt what Thomas Sowell termed (in his "A Conflict of Visions") the "constrained vision," which included the idea that knowledge is dispersed over many generations and over a wide group of people and is not simply the province of a few gifted or bright or authoritarian souls. As applied to my assessment Christianity, this meant for me that the awareness of true Christianity is not to be found among the popes, a few theologians, or FBM pastors, but in the common beliefs of the entire church of Jesus Christ over two thousand years. This is why I so strongly affirm Christian orthodoxy. While I believe heartily in sola Scriptura, I do not believe that I alone (or a few FBM pastors) have a corner on God's truth. I tend to trust the basic beliefs of Christians throughout the last two thousand years rather than the idiosyncratic beliefs of a few pastors or theologians (Fundamental Baptists or otherwise). I agree with G. K. Chesterton in affirming the "democracy of the dead." It is this implicit but collective authority - at least as it pertains to knowledge - that I came to adopt, and repudiated the "pastoral authority" of the FBM. It seemed to undermine God's and the Bible's authority.

Conclusion

For these reasons, I found it necessary to leave the FBM. I am grateful for what it taught me and for those in it that helped nurture me in the Faith; and I applaud and support those in its midst trying to remain true to the Bible. The FBM is well within the bounds of Christianity, and I deem many of its members my Christian brothers and sisters. I pray that each us can sharpen each other and thus come to a greater love for and understanding of our God, His Word and the Faith.

Suggested Reading:

Oswald Allis, Prophecy and the Church
Loraine Boettner, The Millennium
Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture
Gerhard Ebeling, The Problem of Historicity
John Gerstner, Wrongly Dividing the Word of Truth
Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll (eds.), The Bible in America
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism
John MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus
Alister McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine
Andrew Murray, How To Raise Your Children for Christ
John Murray, Christian Baptism
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition (5 volumes)
Rousas John Rushdoony, By What Standard?
------. Institutes of Biblical Law
Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (three volumes)
------. The Principle of Protestantism
A. W. Tozer, The Best of A. W. Tozer
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith
------. A Christian Theory of Knowledge

P. Andrew Sandlin is executive vice president of Chalcedon and editor of the Chalcedon Report and other Chalcedon publications. He has written hundreds of scholarly and popular articles and several monographs.

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