Texas Baptist Forum

Posted: 3/03/06

Texas Baptist Forum

Baptismal confession

I asked Jesus to be my Savior and Lord when I was 4 years old. The reason wasn’t only because I didn’t want to go to hell, but also knowing that I would be living my life without God really bothered me.

At the time, I knew I should be baptized, because God commands it and it’s also a way for me to show the people around me that I have become a Christian. I didn’t want to be baptized because I was afraid of how deep the water was. I wasn’t afraid of water, just of being held under too long.

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“For people everywhere, the United States is a partner for a better life. Short-changing these efforts would increase the suffering and chaos of our world, undercut our long-term security and dull the conscience of our country. I urge members of Congress to serve the interests of America by showing the compassion of America.” George W. Bush In his State of the Union address, urging congressional support for foreign aid “As long as I serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me.” Samuel Alito U.S. Supreme Court justice, in a letter to author/activist James Dobson, read by Dobson on his radio program (New York Times) “I figure that if Jesus could die so that all of my wrongs could be forgiven, I can certainly extend that same grace to you." Mandisa Hundley American Idol contestant and worship leader at Christian women’s conferences, responding to judge Simon Cowell after he criticized her weight (RNS/BP)

Last year, I saw people younger than me be baptized, and that helped me to not be so afraid.

This morning, I will be baptized to show the people around me that I am a Christian and that I’m following what Jesus told me to do, which is to be baptized.

Being baptized doesn’t make me a Christian. It just shows on the outside what happened on the inside when I became a Christian. When I became a Christian, my sins were taken away. When they put me under water, it shows my old life being buried, and when they raise me up, it shows me rising with a new life.

Jonathan Mooney

Alvin

Editor’s note: Uncoached and unprompted, Jonathan wrote this letter and gave it to Assistant Pastor Gene Tipton shortly before Tipton baptized him at Heights Baptist Church in Alvin earlier this year.

Integrating atmosphere

I enjoyed reading the articles that discussed whether an atmospheric model or an integrating faith and learning model is best for Baylor University (Feb. 20). And I appreciate the new president’s call for a balance in which both models apply.

Personally, I don’t see how you can have a Christian atmosphere without an integrating faith and learning approach to learning.

David Blagg

Dublin

Glimpse of God

We were delighted to see the attention the Baptist Standard recently gave to discussions about the character and future of Baylor University.

Our only real disappointment with the articles was the oft-repeated but mistaken claim that the “integration model” requires that Christian faith must somehow be forced into every subject and every class.

As a statement by the provost’s office in October 2003 makes crystal clear, faculty members have never been required to integrate faith and learning in the classroom.

At Baylor, the integration of faith and learning has nothing to do with “creationism,” overt demonstrations of piety in the classroom, or “Christian mathematics.” It has everything to do with examining the ways our scholarly assumptions interact with ideas, allegiances and institutions that make up the world that God has created and redeemed.

These assumptions vary from subject to subject, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach. Whether and to what extent these questions are brought into the classroom depends on many factors, the most important of which is the judgment of the individual instructor.

The integration of faith and learning is a task that can only be done well in a community of learning where scholars trust, learn from and challenge each other.

We believe that when every voice is heard and weighed, when no one is silenced or unduly privileged, something of the truth that sets us free will reveal to us a glimpse of the face of God.

C. Stephen Evans, university professor of philosophy and humanities

Barry Hankins, professor of history and church-state studies

Barry Harvey, associate professor of theology

Ralph C. Wood, university professor of theology and literature

Baylor University

Waco

Theory v. law

It is quite distressing to hear of ministers who decry the opponents of Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory that assumes spontaneous origin without mention of a possible divine author of creation. Can’t people of God recognize a godless declaration, an atheistic philosophy, imposed as fact upon our schoolchildren for generations?

Darwinian theories of evolution are theories only, never attaining status as scientific law.

They are based entirely upon suppositions by a segment of scientists that we and our environs came about by happenstance alone during billions of cosmological years.

Life for us on this planet can exist only when thousands of variables are adjusted and maintained in coordination. Odds against that occurring at random are in the megamillions. 

With a lifelong background of science, I, too, believe in evolution, designed and engineered by a supreme being.

I also believe the Law of Increasing Entropy that states, when applied to the closed system of our universe, that all systems tend to become totally random and disorganized. It is natural law, affirmed by Einstein, not a theory. It negates spontaneous evolution entirely.

The universe heads toward chaos unless there is a divine power countermanding it by intelligent design.

Of the 50 U.S. states, all 50 begin their constitutions recognizing a higher being.

Would that preachers display such unanimity!

Val F. Borum

Fort Worth

Override of liberty

To use the powers of government to pass science off as religion or religion off as science is wrongheaded. A free and thinking people do not need government telling them their faith in God is nothing more than a scientific theory or that their scientific theories must conform to another person’s religious beliefs.

Within his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI uses words that echo the U.S. Constitution’s first and 14th amendment guarantees of freedom from state-sponsored religion. He writes, “The state may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions.”

Counter to this, some religious zealots are bent on pressuring local public school boards into requiring teachers to insert into their lesson plans a new certitude of these true believers, intelligent design creationism. They are free to believe what they will. However, this attempt to use government to promote their religious ideology should be troubling to all people who prize freedom of conscience.

State-sponsored proselytization is a greater threat to our religious freedom than it is a mistaken sally into the domain of science.

Science has and will continue to weather all sorts of misdirected and dead-ended efforts. However, our freedom of conscience may not fare so well.

The override of this liberty would mark the entry of our nation into an intolerant period in which all sorts of intellectual and spiritual pursuits were subject to suppression.

Sam Osborne

West Branch, Iowa

Man’s logic

Brent Walker makes very good points about the religion/evolution debate (Jan. 23). I am a science teacher and Southern Baptist.

I believe that God spoke, creating everything we see, touch, taste, feel and smell. Every argument starts with basic facts—evolution from geological history (of which there are no eyewitnesses) and “intelligent design” from the basis of the Word who created it (also no eyewitnesses). 

It was man’s logic and rationale that “created” all living things through evolution.

Once you get a few basic logically sounding “truths,” such as “all processes occurred in the past the same way that they are occurring in the present” and “younger layers of earth are deposited on older layers,” then we developed radioisotope dating and geological relationships. Suddenly, we discover that our earth is billions of years old! And there is a chain of increasingly more complex living things until ultimately an animal developed by chance called man.

Creationism is a “belief.”

If you evaluate the basis of scientific proofs, you will realize that it, too, is a “belief” system. Their “laws” are based on what is the most logically reproducible explanation that people can “think” of, using only things we sense today. It is not based on eyewitness reports of what happened those billions of years.

So we perpetuate the lie that is being taught in school because it is the most provable by our senses and man’s rationale. A belief system based on man’s logic—evolution.

Steve Livengood

Stamford

A recovering Baptist

I’m celebrating my sixth year of sobriety as a recovering Baptist. Yet I fell off the wagon and visited the Baptist Standard website, in particular, the Texas Baptist Forum. I was shocked, though I shouldn’t have been, by the same tired, worn-out diatribes—inerrancy, evolution, if you show the Super Bowl at church, you’re going to hell, blah, blah.

I don’t miss the turmolic, hair-splitting, scriptural-dissecting, ungodly, un-Christlike nonsense.

I now attend a nondenominational Christian church. I am free to believe God took as much time as he deemed necessary to create the world. If he took a handful of dust or a series of apes, he did it!! If he took 10 million years, he did it!! That’s all that should matter.

I’ll never accept the 10,000 years, plus or minus, that the literalists insist it took for creation, and I’ll never accept that believing in a longer-than-literal creation will somehow bar me from the kingdom. I will recognize reasonable scientific descriptions that some things existed earlier than others, some things adapted, and some things did not adapt and died off, much as humankind will, given our willful bent towards self-destruction, alienation, segregation and ignorance. In all, creation was a grander, much more complex event than could have ever been put in the pages of a book.

I believe Jesus died for all of our sins—period. Let me grapple with my Bible, my science book and my own fate.

Hope to see you all at the finish line.

Mark Clark

Flower Mound

Using government to promote religion is greater risk

To use the powers of government to pass science off as religion or religion off as science is wrongheaded. A free and thinking people do not need government telling them their faith in God is nothing more than a scientific theory or that their scientific theories must conform to another person’s religious beliefs.

Within his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI uses words that echo the U.S. Constitution’s first and 14th amendment guarantees of freedom from state-sponsored religion. He writes, “The state may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions.”

Counter to this, some religious zealots are bent on pressuring local public school boards into requiring teachers to insert into their lesson plans a new certitude of these true believers, intelligent design creationism. They are free to believe what they will. However, this attempt to use government to promote their religious ideology should be troubling to all people who prize freedom of conscience.

State-sponsored proselytization is a greater threat to our religious freedom than it is a mistaken sally into the domain of science. Science has and will continue to weather all sorts of misdirected and dead-ended efforts. However, our freedom of conscience may not fare so well.

The override of this liberty would mark the entry of our nation into an intolerant period in which all sorts of intellectual and spiritual pursuits were subject to suppression.

Sam Osborne

West Branch, Iowa