2. Where Trenham Is Right

A man who is told that there is a smudge on his face may not enjoy hearing it, and he may not much like the person who told him. But he would be foolish to refuse the mirror. Criticism from an opponent is often the most useful kind, because an opponent has no reason to be gentle and every reason to look closely. Rock and Sand looks closely at Protestant churches, Baptist churches among them, and in several places it sees truly.

It is only fair to begin by noticing that Trenham does the same for Protestants. In his tenth chapter he praises their love of Scripture, their zeal for missions, and the personal devotion of many evangelical believers, and he says that he would not be a Christian at all without the Bible that Protestant scholars helped to place in his hands.²⁶ He adds that these virtues “do not validate the Protestant faith.”²⁷ That is true, and the same principle runs the other way. The faults described below do not disprove the Baptist faith. They do, however, deserve an honest hearing.

Conversion Without Instruction

Trenham describes the revival meeting as many Americans have known it: the long gatherings, the testimonies, the emotional climax of the altar call, and the urgent appeal to make a “decision for Jesus Christ.” He observes that this pattern of conversion is often detached from baptism altogether.²⁸ Many evangelicals, he writes, remember the day they prayed “the sinner’s prayer” but do not know the day they were baptized, and some have been baptized several times.²⁹ He grants that the language of “receiving Jesus” comes from Scripture, but he objects that the method is often cut short, with little teaching and little place for baptism.³⁰

Much of this is fair. Where conversion is reduced to a moment at the front of a room and a prayer repeated after a preacher, something has gone wrong. The pattern of the New Testament is different. On the day of Pentecost, “those who gladly received his word were baptized,” and then “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers” (Acts 2:41–42). The Great Commission joins the same three things: making disciples, baptizing them, and “teaching them to observe all the things that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). Faith, baptism, and instruction belong together.

Baptists do distinguish the new birth from baptism, and later sections will defend that distinction from Scripture. But to distinguish two things is not to separate them, still less to neglect one of them. A church that treats baptism as an optional afterthought, or that lets new believers go untaught, has not kept Baptist convictions. It has abandoned them. And when the same believer is baptized again and again because he is never sure that the first time “counted,” the fault lies either in the teaching he received or in his assurance of salvation. Section 6 will return to that second question.

Christians Without a Church

Trenham is also right that much of American Christianity has grown deeply individual. Many believers move from congregation to congregation as they might change grocery stores, and many others belong to no congregation at all. The rise of churches that answer to no one but themselves has sometimes made the problem worse. Trenham overstates the number of denominations, as Section 1 noted,³¹ but the concern behind the number is real.

Scripture gives no encouragement to a solitary faith. “Let us consider how to stimulate each other to love and good works. Let us not abandon our own gatherings, which is the habit of some. Instead, exhort one another” (Heb. 10:24–25). The Christian life is lived among brothers and sisters who know one another, pray for one another, and correct one another. A Baptist who treats his church membership lightly has forgotten something his own tradition teaches. Baptists have always insisted on the local congregation, and Section 4 will show why.

Faith Without Memory

Trenham says that the Anabaptist method of reading Scripture is “firmly a-historical,” as though the labors of earlier generations of Christians did not matter.³² Whatever the truth of that charge about the sixteenth century, it describes many modern evangelicals well enough. A great many Christians could name the pastor who baptized them but could not name a single Christian who lived between the apostle John and the present century.

This is a loss, and an unnecessary one. Christians who hold Scripture as their final authority have nothing to fear from history. A man who is sure of his foundation can walk freely through the whole house. Some of the early Christian writers will appear in later sections of this review, and their testimony will prove to be more friendly to Baptist convictions than Rock and Sand suggests. But even where they disagree, they are worth knowing. It is no compliment to the Bible to pretend that God had nothing to say to His people for eighteen hundred years.

Old Wrongs

Two further points need only a brief word. First, Trenham’s account of the abuses in the late medieval Roman Catholic Church is substantially accurate, including the sale of indulgences and the use of forged documents to support papal claims.³³ Baptists have no reason to dispute it.

Second, Trenham notes that the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 to defend slavery, and that the Convention formally renounced those roots in 1995.³⁴ That is true, and it is a matter for shame, not for excuse. Many Baptist churches, including independent Baptist churches, have never belonged to the Convention. The sins of slavery and racial prejudice were not confined to one denomination or one century, and no Christian tradition, Orthodox or Baptist, has a history free of them.

A Call to Self-Examination

What, then, should a Baptist reader do with these criticisms? Not deny them, and not despair over them. The apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “Test yourselves and see whether you are in the faith, yes, test your own selves” (2 Cor. 13:5). That command applies to churches as well as to individuals. Where Trenham’s criticism lands, the right response is repentance and reform, carried out by the same standard that judges every church: the word of God.

But notice what kind of faults these are. Every one of them is a failure to do what Scripture already teaches. Scripture joins baptism to teaching, and churches that separate them are departing from Scripture. Scripture commands Christians to gather, and believers who drift alone are disobeying it. The cure for each fault is more faithfulness to the Bible, not less.

Trenham sees the matter differently. He traces these faults, and many others, to the Protestant principle that Scripture is the final authority, a principle he calls the source “from which all other Protestant heresies flow.”³⁵ If he is right, the faults described in this section are not accidents but symptoms, and reform by Scripture would only spread the disease. Whether he is right is the question of authority, and it is the subject of the next section.