And spare me the hypocrisy of ‘you Baptists reduce the sacraments to symbols because of an unknowing, secularistic rationalism’ when Newman and her mainline friends reduce liturgy to a mere symbol for so-called ‘social justice’ and other bits of secular politics, and when their communions are precisely the ones that went all in for philosophy and rationalism and interpreted the faith in light of them (e.g., denying miracles in general, and the virgin birth and resurrection in particular).

For some time now, prominent voices have been serenading the church with talk of the glories of catholicity, by which they mean placing the churches of the Reformation in a larger stream of professedly Christian thought and practice that they call, rather giddily, “the Great Tradition.” Granting that we confess the church’s catholicity in our confessions (Westminster 25.1-4; London Baptist 26.1), it is clear that the present movement for catholicity means something different by catholicity than was meant by our forefathers when they framed our confessions. Catholicity, as presently conceived, means ecumenicity, the conscious desire to seek communion with Rome, the Eastern communions, and so-called mainline Protestant denominations as part of the contemporary ecumenical movement.[1]

If there be any doubt this is the case, one need look no further than a book review in Credo’s recent issue on Augustine, a review which first appeared at Presbyterion, the journal of Covenant Theological Seminary, the denominational seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America. In that review Elizabeth Mehlman, who earned her Ph. D. at “Southern Theological Seminary” (presumably Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), positively commends Living the Liturgy: Enlarging the Baptist Vision by Elizabeth Newman. Newman is a professed Baptist who teaches at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Virginia, and who serves as “co-chair of the Baptist World Alliance Delegation for Theological Conversations with the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity,” the Vatican’s office for encouraging ecumenism. The Southern Baptist Convention withdrew from the Baptist World Alliance in 2004 over sundry disagreements,[2] while Union Seminary is an institution of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), which has long since apostatized and just closed its missions agency: going forward that denomination will not send out missionaries, but only the occasional ‘global ecumenical advisor’ to encourage unity among professing Christians and people of other faiths.[3]

The PCUSA has also been dying, consistently losing members since the 1960s so that its membership has fallen from about 4.25 million then to around 1.1 million now. It loses around 110 churches and 50,000 members yearly (net), and at current rate will not exist in another generation or two. The communion is purely a negative example, a study in how not to do things.

One could say the same about all the mainline denominations, including the mainline Baptists. Newman teaches at Union because the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond – formed in reaction to the ‘conservative resurgence’ in the Southern Baptist Convention and “inclusive, with an ecumenical commitment” from its founding – closed its doors in 2019. The professors of such seminaries and denominations have therefore forfeited all right to be heard. And yet Southern Baptists like the editors of Credo, and conservative Presbyterians, like those at Presbyterion, have completely ignored the sordid history of infidelity of the PCUSA, Union, Rome, and the mainline Baptists with whom Newman is associated, and found in her thought something to commend.

Some curious statements rear their heads in Mehlman’s review. She says “Newman invites readers to consider the transformative potential of living a more fully liturgical life by seeing the world as ‘eucharistic’” and that she “found inspiration in Alexander Schmemann’s vision of reality in For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy.” Schmemann helped found the Orthodox Church in America, which, like all Eastern communions, celebrates the Feast of Orthodoxy to commemorate the final triumph of icon worship in their midst.[4]  And yet Newman found him an inspiration, because “‘ecumenism is an exchange gifts’ which builds communion (p. 2).” Against this God says that idolatry is a ‘work of the flesh’ (Gal. 5:19-20) whose participants “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (v. 21; 1 Cor. 6:9-10), but are punished in the Lake of Fire (Rev. 21:8). He says “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater” (1 Cor. 5:11), to “flee from idolatry” (10:14), and to “keep yourselves from idols” (1 Jn. 5:21).

Someone who finds an inspiration in idolaters rather than avoiding them, as God says, is in rebellion as egregious as that of the ancient Israelites, and it is to be feared that she similarly draws near God’s curse upon herself and all who follow her example. Christ rebuked the churches at Pergamum and Thyatira for tolerating idolaters in their midst (Rev. 2:14-16; 20-23), saying if they did not repent he would “come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth” and (of the seductress-to-idolatry Jezebel) “I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead.”  That Newman draws much from the East in not only inspiration but particular practices is admitted by Mehlman, when she says “some readers may perceive an overreliance on Catholic and Orthodox liturgical practices.”

Elsewhere Mehlman says Newman “explores how a secular philosophy, more common in academia, also seeps unwittingly into the church, particularly for many Baptists, who view church liturgy as ‘merely symbolic’ or formulaic.” That is stark raving nonsense. Brother Jim at typical Baptist Church doesn’t dislike high church liturgy or regard the sacraments as symbolic ordinances because he reads secular philosophy, but because of his culture and reading of scripture, and because he is content with the long-established worship practices in which he was raised. When I consider the Baptists whom I know, I am struck nearly speechless at such an asinine remark. When I was baptized at a Baptist church, the piano player was a dairy farmer who had been playing there for something like 67 years, or nearly a third of the republic’s lifespan. To think that people like that could get their ideas about worship and the sacraments from “secular philosophy” is simply ignorant, and says much more about those who assert it than the people about whom it is so blithely asserted. Also, the people who have most treated liturgy as merely symbolic or formulaic are the infidel mainliners among whom Newman dwells, who retain the terms and ceremonies of Christian faith but mean something different by them than they have historically meant, and who then go out and disobey God’s word utterly by subjecting it to worldly ideas (on which more below).

Elsewhere Mehlman says that Newman “explains how Christians are living with a ‘liturgical amnesia’ and have forgotten the world as God’s good creation.” Again, I’m not sure what Baptists such people have in mind, but those whom I know revel in the goodness of creation and do not suffer any amnesia regarding liturgy: they knowingly reject the high church liturgy that Newman likes because they regard it as consisting of manmade traditions that do not honor God, and which do not suffice to express their feelings of devotion as they feel them. There is more fear of God in the humble Baptist mechanic who sings “When the Fire Comes Down from Heaven” and believes every word of it than in the high brow Episcopalian who sings Te Deum and then goes out and lives like the rich man in the parable of Lazarus, dining sumptuously and waxing eloquent about the need to help effect social change.

The thing gets worse. Mehlman says Newman focuses “on the sacraments of the Nicene Creed, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper.” One dearly hopes that is a typo—for the Nicene Creed is not a sacrament. Mehlman also says that “Newman sees the Nicene Creed as a political statement” and that “confessing the Nicene creed is a way of being— ‘part of an ecclesial way of life’ (p. 49).” Two sentences later Mehlman says “liturgy is defined as political action and Newman asks Christians to consider the question, ‘What liturgy or liturgies ought to form our political way of life as Christ’s body?’ (p. 69).” That political here does not refer only to ecclesiastical polity but includes civil politics can be inferred from the following:

In Part III: Bearing Witness—The Church for the World, Newman explores the relationship between worship and creation care, highlighting the story of Samuel Sharpe, a Baptist deacon and slave leader in Jamaica’s abolitionist movement. She uses Sharpe’s life to demonstrate how liturgical practices can inspire and sustain movements for liberation and justice.

One, this strongly commends that the Baptists refuse adding the Nicene Creed to the text of the Baptist Faith and Message, because those who wish to do so are motivated as much by a desire for ecumenicity as for orthodoxy: the Message already contains an orthodox statement on the Trinity, but including the Creed will give its proponents an opportunity to look respectable to Rome, the East, and the (very wealthy) remnants of the mainline by showing how devoted they are to ‘retrieving’ ‘the Great Tradition.’ Presumably that will get them some conference invites and some good reviews on their books, and generally help them to shed the ‘Baptists are radical, curmudgeonly, individualist sectarians’ image for something more acceptable in the eyes of those for whose company they lust.

Two, this is the old mainline/liberal/PCUSA/modernist/social gospel program through and through, the transformation of Christian concepts like worship and the Nicene Creed into something this-worldly and political. That routine of apostasy has failed completely and destroyed the churches that have embraced it, and yet Newman – and by extension, her reviewer and the editors who published her – see fit to offer it to faithful Baptists.  It must be asked whether these people ever paused to consider how such a thing might be perceived by the people in the pews. If I were to share this with my Southern Baptist grandmother, I am confident that she would be deeply insulted at someone implying there is something wrong with her simple hymn-singing, Scripture-is-sufficient, ostentatious-prayer-is-wrong piety, and in them suggesting that she ought to listen to worldly mainliners and Papists to find a ‘deeper’ and ‘more spiritual’ way of serving God. ‘This is why the Southern Baptist Convention is dying,’ I can imagine her saying. ‘They spend all this money on these fancy seminaries, and then they churn out people who promote garbage like this.’

And spare me the hypocrisy of ‘you Baptists reduce the sacraments to symbols because of an unknowing, secularistic rationalism’ when Newman and her mainline friends reduce liturgy to a mere symbol for so-called ‘social justice’ and other bits of secular politics, and when their communions are precisely the ones that went all in for philosophy and rationalism and interpreted the faith in light of them (e.g., denying miracles in general, and the virgin birth and resurrection in particular). Shame on Credo and Presbyterion for commending contemporary ecumenism under guise of wholesome catholicity, and for commending the failed mainline program to those who resist it. Let’s hope they repent and withdraw such rubbish, because it is a disservice to Christ’s sheep, and not at all what they need in this world in which so much trouble abides.

Tom Hervey is a member of Friendship Presbyterian Church in Laurens County, SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 

[1] Strictly speaking, catholic and ecumenical are approximate synonyms for ‘universal’ or ‘worldwide’ in reference to the church, but there is a great deal of disagreement as to what groups ought to be considered part of the church catholic. The present movement for ecumenism proceeds on the assumption that all major groups that profess such are to be accounted parts of Christ’s church, whereas historically many Protestants would deny that Rome, conceived as a visible institution, could be accounted part of the church catholic. For much of the last five hundred years Rome has considered herself the only true church and regarded catholicity as found only with herself, whereas now (esp. since Vatican II) she has opened the suggestion that others participate in catholicity (albeit imperfectly) insofar as they conform to her (Roman catechism, sec. 834). Absolute exclusivity has yielded to conditional inclusivity by association, in other words.

[2] The Baptist World Alliance is a part of the World Council of Churches, which is generally quite liberal in its positions, and whose now-defunct news agency was seldom linked directly by the Aquila Report on that account. See here: https://theaquilareport.com/financial-difficulties-shut-down-world-council-of-churches-a-principal-news-site/

[3] Hence their “226th General Assembly also ‘strongly encourage(d) the Unification Commission to retain funds to preserve the critical placement of mission co-workers and PC(USA) leaders on the ground in ecumenical, interfaith, and civil society contexts globally’” (emphasis mine; the denomination is combining its Office of the General Assembly and Presbyterian Missions Agency, and the Unification Commission is the body that has oversight over this process.)

[4] They attempt to make a distinction between idols and icons, and another between veneration and worship. They argue that idols are representations of things that have no existence, while icons are representations of real persons (Mary, saints, Christ), saying they only venerate icons, refuse any honor to idols, and worship only God. Time will not permit a full analysis of this here, but such distinctions are false and insufficient, and do not match either the spirit or the letter of God’s command that “you shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex. 20:4-5a), a command which endures forever, even after Christ’s advent (Matt. 5:17-18; Lk. 16:17). Even if “carved image” means specifically “idol,” the prohibition of “any likeness of anything” makes hollow any attempt to argue a difference between idols and other images. And while some of their veneration of some icons (e.g. saints) may not be worship as such, it is still superstitious in the extreme and proceeds on errant notions that can easily be used to justify full-bore idolatry (e.g., the what is offered to an icon passes through it to what it represents).