BOSTON (BP) – Multiple Southern Baptist voices will join others at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting scheduled for Nov. 18-20.
Craig Blaising, senior professor of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is one of the three plenary speakers. Numerous professors from all six SBC seminaries will present papers throughout the meeting’s three days.
The 77th ETS Annual Meeting will focus on the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Blaising will present his paper, “The Bible and the Nicene Creed.”
To clarify, that is the original composed and adopted by the Council of Nicaea in 325, Blaising told BP. The version recited in churches today is actually a creed adopted at the Council of Constantinople in 381 and consequently referred to as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
“I see the controversy that led to the Nicene Creed as primarily a dispute over the interpretation of Scripture,” he said. “The creed adopted by the Council was composed almost entirely of words and phrases from Scripture to be a biblically accurate statement of Christian faith about God the Father and the Son of God within the Trinity. Famously, there are two places in the creed where a word is used that is not found in Scripture, but the evidence we have is that the Council understood those words in reference to a collection of biblical texts such that the creedal words were understood to convey the meaning found in those texts.”
The Creed was meant to push back against the false teachings of Arius of Alexandria, who said Jesus was a creature created by God. As such, Jesus is not Himself truly God.
“The Nicene Creed was not meant to be an external authority outside of Scripture, rather it was meant to refer to what is truly in Scripture, seeing Scripture as the source and norm of true theology,” Blaising said.” Neither was it a complete expression of Christian faith. Rather it was composed to speak directly to the theological heresy that was confronting the churches at that time.”
New Orleans Theological Seminary’s Adam Harwood joined the ETS in 2003 as a Ph.D. student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. His paper on the possible relation between the unpardonable sin in the Gospels and Hebrew 6 will be his 10th to present at the ETS annual meeting.
“It provides an opportunity to receive peer critique on biblical and theological research,” said Harwood, professor of theology and McFarland Chair of Theology. “Members submit formal paper proposals, which are evaluated by a committee, and only some of the proposals are accepted. It’s valuable for Southern Baptists to be present at the meetings to hear and be heard on trends in biblical interpretation, biblical archaeology, apologetics, theology, church history, and related areas.
“My presentation will explore the challenges of determining the relationship between Jesus’ comments on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit in the Gospels and the warning passage in Hebrews 6:4-6. I look forward to testing my findings at the meeting.”
Members of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s Research Institute and other staff are also slated to participate. Among them are Nathan Finn, senior fellow for Religious Liberty; Jason Thacker, director of the Research Institute; and Gregg Allison, senior fellow for Marriage & Family.
“Southern Baptists have always valued the importance of cultivating orthodox theological scholarship,” said RaShan Frost, ERLC’s director of Research and senior fellow for Human Dignity. “Our participation at the ETS annual meeting demonstrates our commitment to biblically faithful scholarship while underscoring how that work has a downstream impact on life at the local church. We are committed to resourcing our churches, and our work as well as affiliating with groups like ETS helps us accomplish that mission so that together, we can share the gospel in our communities and spheres of influence.”
Jonathan McCormick, director of Library Services at Gateway Seminary, will be a speaker in the Baptist Studies Group that is moderated by Anthony Chute, professor of Church History at California Baptist University. McCormick’s paper is “The Baptist Faith and Message, 1925, in its Original Context.”
“The observations are implications and expansions of my work in my dissertation from Gateway Seminary in 2018,” said McCormick. “There is a resurgence of interest in the content and function of confessions. I hope that we can provide a historical context of the Baptist confessions and encourage discussion about these important summaries of those articles of the Christian faith which are most surely held among us.”
Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Patrick Schreiner will present on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. His first will cover AI for Academics, while the second will focus on the Fourfold Sense.
“We will be talking about the perils and possibilities of AI for those who work in our field,” Schreiner told BP. “I will be addressing how academics can use AI for good, but others will also warn about some dangers of AI for academics.
“The second session I’m participating in is one on hermeneutics where several scholars will discuss the medieval fourfold sense, which is a view of interpretation. Each presenter will address different aspects of this method, and I will be talking about how premodern interpreters understood how words/language work.”
The artificial intelligence discussion will address the differences between generative and iterative AI, the latter defined by taking already-existing content and improving it.
“I have used it to copy edit my own writing after I’ve composed it and I’ve also used it to summarize my own work for sharing on social media,” said Schreiner on examples for positive use. “In terms of the dangers I’m guessing [their points] will be on creating content and passing that off as if it is your own and basing research on it when it is not correct. I’ve asked it theological questions, and it has certainly got things wrong.”
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