NASHVILLE (BP) — “The hour of magnetic concern” had arrived at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting, as the Tennessee Baptist and Reflector put it. The convention’s confession of faith was the topic at hand. Messengers were debating whether to tailor it specifically to address a cultural flashpoint or whether that would do more harm than good.

On one side of the discussion stood the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the other a popular writer that messengers knew well.

Was this a recent event? Hardly. It occurred a century ago at the 1925 SBC annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn., as the convention prepared to adopt The Baptist Faith in Message (BF&M). Southern Seminary President E.Y. Mullins argued for a broad confession of faith while Oklahoma’s C.P. Stealey, editor of the Baptist Messenger, wanted a more specific statement countering Darwinian evolution.

From the BF&M’s inception, the convention has debated the character of its confessionalism. A century ago, the debate was how specific to be about Darwinism. Today it’s how specific to be about female pastors. In both cases, Baptist historians say, Southern Baptists tended to agree on principles. Their debate was how to translate the principles into a confession of faith. Examining the past, the historians say, can help solidify Southern Baptists’ stand in the days ahead.

“You had a battle between conservatives who were concerned about drift and conservatives who were, for the most part, convinced that the Southern Baptist Convention’s mechanisms in place were sufficient to address those concerns whenever they arose,” said SBC Recording Secretary Nathan Finn, a Baptist historian at North Greenville University. “The Baptist Faith and Message 1925 was a bit of a compromise document.”

In 1925, theological liberalism was creeping into Baptist life, and most Southern Baptists wanted no part of it. For the culture at large, “the principles of empiricist science seemed to undermine Christianity’s claim to absolute truth and morality,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) historian Gregory Wills wrote. Specifically, geology’s claim of an old earth seemed to discredit the Bible’s timeline of creation, and Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” seemed to overturn the notion of humanity’s direct creation by God. Progressives adjusted Scripture to fit the new scientific paradigm.

The first prominent Southern Baptist to adopt the new thinking was Old Testament professor Crawford Toy at Southern Seminary. He was forced to leave Southern in 1879 after adopting evolutionary theory and denying the complete truthfulness of Scripture. Two years later, the SBC’s Foreign Mission Board (now International Mission Board) rescinded the appointments of two missionaries over their similar views on the Bible.

By the early 20th century, Southern Seminary’s W.O. Carver argued in his book “Missions and Modern Thought” that all religions were “more or less successful movements toward God.” The advance of liberalism was more extreme in the Northern Baptist Convention, where theological liberals won vote after vote.

What was the SBC to do about theological liberalism? Write a uniting confession of faith, said Blake McKinney, assistant professor of history and humanities at Texas Baptist College of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“The churches that came together to originally found the SBC” were “confessionally guided and committed, but there wasn’t a uniting confession for the Convention itself,” McKinney said. “As the years progressed, they began to see more and more of a need for this.”

With the adoption of the BF&M, Southern Baptists were united in opposing liberalism. The committee that proposed the BF&M, chaired by Mullins, put it like this: “The present occasion for a reaffirmation of Christian fundamentals is the prevalence of naturalism in the modern teaching and preaching of religion.”

The debate was how specific the SBC’s confession of faith should be. Stealey moved amending the proposed BF&M to insert a statement that “man came into this world by direct creation of God and not by evolution.”

Mullins objected, according to the Baptist and Reflector’s report, claiming “a matter in which science is concerned should not be included in a confession of faith.” Plus, he added, the proposed confession already affirmed the supernatural.

The less specific version of confessionalism prevailed. Mullins won the day, with Stealey’s proposal failing 2,013 to 950.

Finn says both streams of conservatism are still present in the SBC. The convention goes back and forth between what he calls the “thick” confessionalism of the Stealey party and the thinner confessionalism of the Mullins party.

“There are two different postures among engaged Southern Baptists,” Finn said. Some say, “We are fundamentally healthy, but there are always things we need to look out for [and] areas we need to improve.” Others say, “The SBC is in a whole heap of trouble. … There is way more error than there ought to be.”

People with both postures “are looking at the same Southern Baptist Convention,” he said. “But dispositionally they are just in different places on that spectrum.” Their varying dispositions yield different ideas about how the BF&M should be crafted and interpreted.

At the BF&M’s century mark, it’s time for the convention to solidify its confessional posture, McKinney said, because the SBC’s cooperation in years to come depends on its doctrinal foundation.

“While regaining an emphasis on confessions,” he said, “in many cases we have lost an emphasis on cooperation.” The 100th anniversary of both the BF&M and the Cooperative Program “is a really helpful moment to say, ‘Here is our faith, and here is our faith in action.’”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — David Roach is a writer in Mobile, Ala.)