“Some people thought there was something odd about Jesus’ birth... It may be that Jesus was an illegitimate son” (Desmond Tutu, Cape Times, October 24, 1980).

“The Holy Spirit is not limited to the Christian Church. For example, Mahatma Gandhi, who is a Hindu ... The Holy Spirit shines through him” (Desmond Tutu, St. Alban’s Cathedral, Pretoria, South Africa, November 23, 1978).

Brutal Marxist dictator Fidel Castro, who has persecuted and restricted the churches of Jesus Christ in Cuba for decades, was a speaker at the Baptist World Alliance meeting in July 2000.

In January 2001, a delegation from the Baptist World Alliance met at the Vatican with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity to continue their dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.

On January 24, 2002, Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, joined hands with Pope John Paul II at the third Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi, Italy. This ecumenical pagan prayer gathering featured some 200 religious leaders, including representatives of such “Christian” denominations as Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed, Baptist, Lutheran, Mormon, Methodist, Quaker, Pentecostal, Mennonite, as well as representatives of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Bahai, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Tenrikyo (Japan), and members of African and North American “traditional religions.” That the general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance would participate in such a thing is irrefutable evidence of his apostasy.

The AMERICAN BAPTIST CHURCHES USA is another sponsoring organization of the New Baptist Covenant. As early as 1910 Baptist leader William B. Riley testified that the denomination had been “surrendered into the hands of the Higher Critics” (George Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism). In 1932 and 1947, many pastors left the Northern Baptist Convention (the predecessor to the American Baptist Churches USA) in protest of its modernism and formed the General Association of Regular Baptists and the Conservative Baptist Association of America.

The American Baptist Churches USA has produced some of the most notorious, blasphemous heretics of the 20th century.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City*, denied practically every doctrine of the Christian faith. In 1945, Fosdick wrote the following to an individual who inquired about his beliefs: “Of course I do not believe in the virgin birth or in that old-fashioned substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, and I know of no intelligent person who does.” Yet when an attempt was made by some to disassociate the convention from that church in 1926, the delegates, by a margin of three to one, voted to remain in fellowship with this blasphemous man and his congregation. (* James Forbes, the current very liberal pastor of Riverside Church, was one of the speakers at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration.)

In his book In Him Is Life, Robert Beaven, president of the Chicago Baptist Missionary Training School, denied that Jesus Christ is God. This was the man chiefly responsible for the education of their missionaries in those days.

The 1950 Baptist Convention meeting featured blasphemous modernist G. Bromley Oxnam, who called the God of the Old Testament a “dirty bully” (Oxnam, Preaching in a Revolutionary Age, p. 72), because his unregenerate, rebellious mind would not accept the righteous judgment of God upon sin.

A.S. Hobart and Henry Vedder, professors at the American Baptist Crozer Seminary, denied the substitutionary blood atonement of Jesus Christ.

Norris Tibbets, former pastor of the Riverside Church, denied Christ’s bodily resurrection.

Nels F.S. Ferre, professor at Andover-Newton Theological School, denied the virgin birth, deity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He claimed that the Old Testament taught an “outworn morality” (Ferre, Pillars of Faith, p. 95). He stated that “God differs from all men, including Jesus, in that His personality alone is eternal and the Creator of all other personalities” (Ferre, The Christian Faith, 1942, p. 102). He conjectured that Jesus might have been the son of a Roman soldier (Ferre, Christian Understanding of God, p. 186). He claimed that accepting the Bible as the infallible Word of God is idolatry (Ferre, The Sun and the Umbrella, p. 39).

In the 1960s, William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School (American Baptist) taught that God is dead. Hamilton was defended in 1966 by Colgate president Gene Bartlett. Eventually Hamilton dropped out of church entirely. An article in Baptists Today, February 2008, was titled “Theologian Who Heralded ‘Death of God’ Ponders His Own.” Copies of this issue of the magazine were available at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. The article concluded, “He remains a Christian who doesn’t go to church. And faced with his own morality he doesn’t think much about God anymore, except when asked.”

The American Baptist Churches USA in 1968 stated that abortion “should be a matter of responsible personal decision.”

American Baptist (Harvard) professor Harvey Cox is a notorious modernist. He does not believe that followers of pagan religions are on their way to Hell. He was a speaker at the World Congress for the Synthesis of Science and Religion in India in 1986. The conference was organized by a Hindu organization.

The June 1991 issue of WATCHword, a women’s ministry paper of the American Baptist Churches, stated: “What I have come to love about Scripture is the fact that it is not inerrant. That it is not perfect. That it is not complete. That it does contradict itself...”

An ABC publication entitled “Oneness in Christ: American Baptists Are Ecumenical” leaves no doubt about their position. This publication was compiled and edited by the “Reverend” Martha Barr, former Assistant General Secretary and Ecumenical Officer of the ABC. “We American Baptists run the whole theological range--fundamentalists, conservative orthodox, liberal ... Maybe it is partly because American Baptists are so inclusive that we affirm that we are ecumenical. ... We do not have creedal statements. We can worship and work with Episcopalian and Pentecostal, with Roman Catholic and Orthodox.”

Many American Baptist churches accept unrepentant homosexuals as members. Fifty-four ABC congregations are members of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, which encourages the acceptance of homosexuality in Baptist churches. This Association “advocates for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons within Baptist communities of faith. The Pacific Southwest region of the ABC voted on May 11, 2006, to withdraw from the denomination because of the denomination’s acceptance of churches with lax policies on homosexuality (“Split among American Baptists,” Baptist Press, May 18).

The ASSOCIATION OF WELCOMING AND AFFIRMING BAPTISTS (AWAB), though not official sponsors of the New Baptist Covenant Celebration, had a booth at the conference and thus promoted their agenda to the attendees, and the wife of Tony Campolo, one of the plenary speakers, is an outspoken supporter and a member of the AWAB council. The mission of the AWAB is “to create and support a community of churches, organizations and individuals committed to the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons in the full life and mission of Baptist churches.” We interviewed a council member of the AWAB, Kathy Stayton, (left) and she told us that she does not believe the first three chapters of Genesis are literal history, that marriage is a divinely-ordained institution, or that homosexual acts, even outside of “committed relationships,” are sinful. She said, “I put no label on other people’s behaviors. I’m not going to ask any other heterosexual couple to tell me the last time you had sex with somebody who is not your partner.”

The Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists were distributing an article by Peggy Campolo entitled “Some Answers to the Most Common Questions about God’s GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered] Children” from the Summer 2000 edition of The InSpiriter. Campolo quotes James Forbes, one of the speakers at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration, as saying, “God has many children, and some of them are straight.” Campolo instructs homosexuals to “ask the Holy Spirit to give you a sense of God’s timing” about “coming out” of the closet! She says, “I can celebrate

DUAL ASSOCIATION WITH THE COOPERATIVE BAPTIST FELLOWSHIP AND THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION

The New Baptist Covenant Celebration reminded me that the Southern Baptist Convention is a mixed multitude at the state and local level.

The SBC has a local, a regional, a state, and a national aspect. Only someone trying to excuse his affiliation with liberalism would claim that the Southern Baptist convention only exists at the national level. If this were true, there would not be such a thing as a Southern Baptist congregation, but we know that there is such a thing. It is the state conventions that fund the national convention, and at the state level liberalism is very much alive among Southern Baptists.

Many pastors and congregations are dually affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and other liberal groups.

For example, the more conservative Southern Baptist pastors in the state of Virginia formed the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia (SBCV) in 1996, but it works alongside of the older and very liberal Baptist General Association of Virginia (BGAV). One of the conservative leaders, T.C. Pinckney, testified, “The BGAV IS RAPIDLY DEPARTING FROM ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY” (Baptist Press, September 17, 1996).

Yet, churches can remain members of the old liberal Virginia state convention even while participating with the new conservative convention. Some 20% of the 292 churches in the SBCV are also a part of the BGAV (Fundamentalist Digest, March-April 2001, p. 11). This is strange. On one hand we are told by conservative Virginia Baptist leaders that the BGAV is rapidly departing from orthodox Christianity, but they refuse to separate from this apostasy in a plain manner and they allow churches affiliated with this apostasy to join hands with them in their new convention.

This dual affiliation was evident at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. We were told that many Southern Baptists were in attendance even though the national leaders refused to participate.

Adam Garner, who is pursuing a doctor of divinity at Mercer University and who was manning the Mercer booth, told us that his father is a long-time Southern Baptist pastor and a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I asked him if his father is more affiliated today with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship than the Southern Baptist Convention, and he replied:

“He is still a Baptist minister and a professor at a liberal arts school. He is affiliated with both [the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Southern Baptist Convention] and he enjoys that fellowship. He has networks in both places, and he talks about all the things the Southern Baptist Convention gave him and cultivated in him and taught him and all the lessons that got him to where he is now. And he also talks about those lessons being cultivated through the CBF.”

Contrary to Southern Baptist practice, the proper biblical protest against doctrinal heresy is to separate from it.

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them” (Romans 16:17).

“Can two walk together, except they be agreed?” (Amos 3:3).

SOCIAL GOSPEL, KINGDOM BUILDING

A secondary theme of the conference was social work or kingdom building. The objective of the New Baptist Covenant is to “promote peace with justice; to feed the hungry; clothe the naked; shelter the homeless; care for the sick and the marginalized; welcome the strangers among us; and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity.”

Theological liberalism has always eventually replaced the biblical gospel of redeeming souls with a humanistic gospel of redeeming society. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), often called the father of the “social gospel,” was a Baptist. He was raised in a conservative family, but he adopted liberal theological beliefs as a student at Rochester Theological Seminary, which reminds us again that liberalism is not a new problem among Baptists. Rauschenbusch rejected the inerrancy of Scripture and the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. He wrote: “Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins” (Theology for the Social Gospel, 1917).

Even as a liberal, Rauschenbusch believed in the preaching of the gospel and the call to a new birth (though, in typical liberal fashion, he redefined these terms), but he added the social dimension through the concept of kingdom building.

“Rauschenbusch's view of Christianity was that its purpose was to spread a Kingdom of God, not through a fire and brimstone style of preaching but by leading a Christlike life. Rauschenbusch did not view Jesus' death as an act of substitutionary atonement but in his words, he died ‘to substitute love for selfishness as the basis of human society.’ He wrote that ‘Christianity is in its nature revolutionary’ and tried to remind society of that. He explained that the Kingdom of God ‘is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven’” (“Walter Rauschenbusch,” Wikipedia).

Rauschenbusch formed a group called the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, which sought to reestablish the priority of kingdom building as the proper objective of Christianity.

Rauschenbusch has been called “the one man who had done more than any other to change thought in the present generation” (The Nation, July 20, 1918). In 1919, the Northern Baptist Convention, the predecessor to the American Baptist Church USA, called him “the most potent personality in America in the modern revival of the idea of the Kingdom of God” (Annual of the Northern Baptist Convention, 1919, pp. 169-71).

Rauschenbusch’s views are echoed today by the New Baptist Covenant. He would have been perfectly at home at this convocation and they would have been perfectly at ease with him and his liberalism. Rauschenbusch’s doctrine had a strong influence on Martin Luther King, Jr., who was so exalted at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration.

It is enlightening that the August 2007 issue of the Baptist Studies Bulletin, a publication of Mercer University, contained both a challenge about the importance of the New Baptist Covenant as well as a positive review of Rauschenbusch’s book A Theology of the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch was also praised in a pamphlet on the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that I picked up at the CBF booth at the conference.

Gospel preaching is always eventually crowded out by social work. The movement that Rauschenbusch created soon left gospel preaching behind and focused exclusively on the social aspect.

We witnessed the same thing at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration. The leaders claim to believe in the salvation of the soul as well as the salvation of society, but the fact is that the emphasis of the convocation was almost entirely upon the latter. During the more than 12 hours of plenary sessions, there were no messages on winning souls to Christ, but there were many messages on social work. Almost all of the 16 various Special Interest Sessions in the afternoons focused on social-justice issues. Following are some of the subjects: engaging the criminal justice system, breaking cycles of poverty, peacemaking, faith and public policy, sexual exploitation, race as a continuing challenge, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and responding to national disasters.

One of the plenary speakers was Marian Edelman, (right) founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. She presented a litany of social troubles in America (e.g., one of three young black men will serve time in prison) and called for vast government intervention in the form of higher taxation, the redistribution of wealth, and every sort of governmental social program. What she did not say is that this liberal solution to the problem has been tried for the last half century, with mind-boggling amounts of money spent by the government on ending poverty and injustice, and the problem has only grown worse.

Edelman also called for an end to high military spending and quoted someone who stated that every gun and rocket that is purchased by the military signifies a theft from the poor. She quoted Martin Luther King saying that when a nation spends more on the military than social uplift that nation is near destruction.

Edelman mentioned the need for moral responsibility and leadership on the part of parents and adults, and said that the problem with “our children” is the failure of adults to be the examples and godly trainers they should be. She should have stopped right there, but she undermined this by her focus on liberal politics and her exaltation of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. The truth of the matter is that King’s example and principles have done much to destroy the moral and social fabric of black people in America. He was a dedicated communist and a very immoral man. Instead of teaching his people to help themselves, he taught them to look to government and to blame others for their problems. Instead of showing an example of morality, he led a degenerate life. The FBI uncovered his habit of using funds from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to hire prostitutes to keep him entertained during the civil rights tours. The night before he was murdered, he was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis with prostitutes. J. Edgar Hoover tried to warn the president and congress by making all files available to them, but when a federal judge sealed the files until the year 2027 the mainstream media said nothing.