My Time Being a Religious Conservative | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Many readers may have thought that Stan is right---I am a "LIBERAL." I am critical about the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. They assume I have been against anything conservative from the beginning.

    You would be dead wrong on that assumption!

    I was reared a Southern Baptist preacher's son. My father came out of the Moon's Grove Baptist Church near Danielsville, GA. That is in the vicinity of Athens. He was a faithful Baptist boy who was in church every Sunday. He felt his call to preach while plowing a mule and meditating in the cotton field. His was the kind of church where they shouted and sang hymns of tradition. "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb, There is Power in the Blood, Amazing Grace, In The Cross," are but a few of the traditional songs with people shedding tears as they sung.

    Daddy bowed behind that mule and knelt in the fresh dirt to promise God he would answer the call to preach. The next Sunday he went to church and walked down to the front during the Invitation hymn. He whispered in the ear of the sweating preacher who had yelled his way through the sermon, "God has called me to preach and I must go to Mercer for education." Immediately the church ladies came by and begged him, "Claude, don't you go over there to that thar school. They will ruin you!!! Edgycashun keeps God from using you!!!"

    My father had the good fortune of a teacher in high school that encouraged critical thinking. He arrived at Mercer in a time of great religious debate over the Second Coming. You had to be pre-millennial / post-millennial / a-millennial. There were no positions except the firm position of the 3 mentioned. I will not bore you with detailed analysis. You can Google them if you care to. Another debate of that day is the same as today: "Is the Bible literal, figurative, or just a stupid book written by pre-scientific mankind? Did God dictate the King James Version or is it a result of the English King breaking with the Papal control of Europe? Do you worship the Bible as a thing like the golden calf of Israel -- or is it a reliable guide to religious understanding?"

    My father quickly earned the nickname of "Socrates." His method was the same as the great Greek philosopher: ask questions. Rather than debate a fool, simply ask him questions until his line of reasoning either runs out or he is forced to consider more things than before! You don't change a prejudiced mind with constant argument. You simply ask questions in an attempt to arrive at a consistent TRUTH. Real TRUTH is ever-changing as you learn more things.

    My father started with a debate between majoring in law or theology. His first class was in law and he had bought his books. His real desire was to help people, no matter his profession. He was startled by the outstanding professor of law. Mercer was the top Georgia school in both specialties then as it is now.

    The Professor came in and laid his stack of law books on the big desk. He went to the blackboard and told the students, "I am going to first tell you how become a successful lawyer." With that he went to the big blackboard and wrote:

       1. Get your retainer!

       2. Get your retainer!

       3. Same as 1 and 2!

    My wise father quickly surmised: Law is about money more than helping clients. He went to the Bookstore and traded his law books for the ones in the theology course!

    He loved to debate, as do I. One of his favorite college stories was over the book of Revelation being literal or figurative. His "so intelligent" rival was pontificating that Revelation was, as with the entire Bible, LITERAL. The particular passage was a "woman sitting on the 7 hills of Rome." If it were literal, then a single woman was somehow able to sit on 7 hills at the same time. If it were figurative, it was referring to the 7 Christian churches in Rome, each perched on one of the hills. As his opponent continued to insist on the passage being literal, my father made this astute observation to him: "Either that is a woman with a hell of a seating capacity or it is a figurative description of the churches---which do you, choose? She could only be sitting on 7 ant hills and that would be a quick disaster of ants covering her body!" With that he left the debate having a smile on his face.

    My father was always a good Conservative. He knew the difference between "that which is essential" --- and becoming "so liberal you throw out the baby with the bathwater." A wise person refuses to become a modern day fool over too much and too hard traditionalism. It is the basic difference between being PROGRESSIVE and becoming REGRESSIVE. The Bible always has a primitive world view of earth as the center of the solar system. It was a square body of land with water beneath and sky above. If you sailed out of sight of land, you could fall off!

    From that beginning and training I ventured to Emory as a pre-med major. When I hit chemistry and heard the horror stories of Organic Chemistry, I decided to check out Psychology. I had done a senior term paper on Parapsychology. Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University was the first person to develop tests to prove or disprove its existence. That was a mix of spirituality and science. Dr. Rhine told stories of how spiritual things happened over space and time. His objective tests involved cards with symbols on them. On each side of a blind screen 2 students were asked to transfer their thoughts about the symbols from sender to receiver. Those tests gave a statistically significant number of sends defying the odds to an 80-90% level! I had hoped to go from Emory to Duke and, possibly encounter Dr. Rhine --- but God had a different track for me to follow.

    I will tell you more later, but with applications in to Psychology Graduate School I felt my call to ministry! I went to the front of my church. That fall I was at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, NC.

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