[1]OKLAHOMA CITY (BP)–One of the last living members of the committee that penned changes to the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message says the committee’s foremost goal was to clarify Southern Baptists’ belief in biblical authority amid the controversies of its day.
Garth Pybas, 86, a retired pastor and a native Oklahoman, said during a nearly two-hour, videotaped interview for Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary’s historical archives that language in the 1963 document concerning Christ as the “criterion” for interpreting Scripture was meant to convey biblical infallibility based on Christ’s testimony of it in the gospels.
Pybas said Southern Baptist leaders in 2000 likewise aimed to clarify biblical truth for a changing culture and that his peers never intended the 1963 statement to be the final chapter on Baptist beliefs.
The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message changed the “criterion” language of 1963, causing critics of the 2000 statement to allege that Baptist conservatives had placed Scripture above Christ and were guilty of “bibliolatry.”
The late Herschel Hobbs, chairman of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message study committee and then-president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor at Oklahoma City’s First Baptist Church, appointed Pybas, then a Kansas pastor, to a five-member subcommittee responsible for the legwork on the ’63 statement.
Pybas said Hobbs’ high regard for the priesthood of the believer — that all Christians have direct divine access — has been abused by some Baptist moderates who have used it to resist doctrinal accountability.
“He did believe in the priesthood of the believer. However, he believed that there were doctrines that were important that we had to believe,” Pybas said. “Of course, anybody can believe what they want to, but I don’t think anybody can believe what they want to and still be a good Baptist.”
In 1961, the then-Sunday School Board’s Broadman Press published “The Message of Genesis,” a book by Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Ralph H. Elliott that questioned the validity of portions of Genesis.
The book fueled the fire for the 1963 revision, Pybas said.
“When Elliott wrote that book, I’d been elected [Kansas state convention] president that same year,” Pybas recalled. “I have never seen such a shock by people that some Southern Baptist professor would write a book more or less making light of some of the miracles in the Book of Genesis.”
Elliott’s book prompted a crowd estimated by Pybas of 500 Southern Baptist pastors and leaders from several states to meet at Oklahoma City’s Capitol Hill Baptist Church in 1962 to plan a response to the controversy.
“It was just a self-appointed thing. We could all speak, and everybody was worked up.”
Elliott’s book also was the focus of conversation at the Pastors’ Conference during the 1962 SBC annual meeting in San Francisco, Pybas said.
That same year, as pastor of Topeka’s First Southern Baptist Church and president of his state’s Baptists, Pybas joined presidents of 22 other state conventions on a committee appointed to review the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message.
Six seminary professors opposed the committee’s formation, Pybas said. Hobbs, as SBC president, was chairman of the committee and appointed Pybas, Nane Starnes of North Carolina, James H. Landes of Texas, V.C. Kruschwitz of Kentucky and C.Z. Holland of Arkansas to a five-member subcommittee to recommend revisions and then report back to the larger group.
Pybas said he at first was surprised and hesitant, explaining to Hobbs that Kansas only had about 35,000 Southern Baptists.
“He said, ‘Garth, I think I know where you stand, and I want you on this committee.’ I said, ‘OK.'”
The subcommittee began work on revisions during a three-day meeting at Gulf Shores, Miss., in August 1962.
“Those were great men on there and not one of them wanted to be liberal,” Pybas said.
The revised BF&M passed without changes at the SBC annual meeting in Kansas City, Mo., the next summer.
The first article, titled “The Scriptures,” concluded with a sentence that read, “The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.”
Pybas said the sentence was added at Hobbs’ request to refute Elliott’s contention that the Genesis account contained errors.
“Elliott said a lot of [Genesis miracles] were just fairy tales, myths. And yet Jesus quoted them. Well, Jesus, the divine Son of God, had to know. I don’t think he’d have quoted something that wasn’t true. And that’s why Dr. Hobbs suggested putting it in there.”
Hobbs had used similar language in his 1962 convention address, which contrasted Southern Baptists’ Bible-centered theology against neo-orthodoxy — or “the halfway point between the conservative theology of the Reformation and the extremes of modern liberal theology,” as Hobbs described it.
Hobbs never mentioned Elliott or his book in his address, but his sermon described various theological crises up to that point, including the so-called “modernist-fundamentalist” debates of the 1920s that led to the first Baptist Faith and Message and the rise of neo-orthodoxy, plus the reasons why he believed modernism and neo-orthodoxy missed the mark.
Pybas said although the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message eliminated Hobbs’ “criterion” passage in favor of new language, it does not make the Bible an object of worship.
“What did they worship before 1963?” Pybas asked rhetorically, alluding to the 1925 statement which did not include Hobbs’ language either. “It was never, never, that I can find, in any Baptist statement before it was put in [in 1963]…. We only faced the problems that existed in the convention at that time.
“Are they insinuating that the 10 million Southern Baptists that existed [before 1963] worshiped the Bible instead of Christ? Are they insinuating … that all of those before we put that in there worshiped the Bible? That is ridiculous.”
Also during the interview, conducted Dec. 3 at Pybas’ Oklahoma City home by David P. Nelson, assistant professor of theology at Southeastern, Pybas said he was “amazed” that the 1998 family amendment to the Baptist Faith and Message prompted some critics to publicly describe SBC leaders as “Neanderthals.”
“Some of them missed the point,” Pybas said, adding that the intent was to uphold biblical marriage amid changing cultural mores.
Pybas said he was bothered by a statement by Jeffry Zurheide, the current pastor of Oklahoma City’s First Baptist Church, that Hobbs was “smiling down” from heaven after the church’s vote to withdraw from the SBC.
Asked how Southern Baptists can contend for truth and still practice charity toward critics, Pybas said, “I have to admit that I have a time with that. I have real problems. And I’ve fought it. And I get to the place where you just have to consider that everybody doesn’t agree.”
A native of McClain County, Okla., who was raised as the son of a dirt farmer father, Pybas told of his conversion as a boy at a noonday revival service during a break from picking cotton.
W.A. Criswell, then a pastor in Chickasha, Okla., ordained Pybas to preach at age 23. He said God’s providence has led him through a fruitful and storied ministry.
“I know that I’m about through,” said Pybas, who has endured health problems recently. “I was ordained 63 years ago. But God is raising up some great young preachers who are going to go ahead and preach. And I think our denomination will do great if we just keep believing the Bible and preaching the Bible and living the Bible and loving people.
“We need to love everybody. I’ve heard Christians say they didn’t love everybody. Well, I love everybody. I may not agree with some of the things. And especially right now, with this enemy over there [in Afghanistan]…. A lot of people say they’d just like to kill ’em all. I’d like to win ’em all to the Lord.”
–30–
Note: The first name of Jeffry Zurheide is spelled correctly with one e.
(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at https://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: GARTH PYBAS.