by Matthew Y. Emerson
Last week, Matthew Barrett, formerly of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, announced that he and his family are joining the Anglican Communion. This shift prompted many responses, including some from my fellow Baptists suggesting that retrieval projects like Matthew’s are inherently problematic for those who wish to retain their commitments to Baptist distinctives.
As a co-founder and co-director of The Center for Baptist Renewal—a group whose mission is “to equip today’s Baptists with the resources of the Baptist and broader Christian tradition so they might incorporate these beliefs and practices into the life of the local church”—and as someone who has worked with Matthew in various capacities over the last twelve years, I and my fellow co-directors have been asked regularly about the relationship between our project to Matthew’s. I felt it might be helpful to try and clarify why and how our retrieval projects have been and are different and why it remains beneficial for Baptists to retrieve the Christian past for the sake of contemporary renewal in our doctrine and practice.
To begin, I should note briefly that this post is not a comment on Matthew’s personal theological and ecclesial decisions. As someone who has lived through an actual “tornado” and its aftermath on the institution which I help lead, I understand the chaos one can feel when going through a turbulent time in life. The decision Matthew and his family have made are their own, and, though I disagree, the point of this post is not to criticize, shame, or otherwise comment on it. My aim is simply to demonstrate how and why our retrieval projects have always been different, and therefore also why retrieval in a distinctively Baptist mode remains beneficial and, dare I say, necessary for healthy Baptist thought and practice.
First, to state things as plainly as possible, CBR has always existed as a distinctively Baptist project. That is, we’ve always been about emphasizing both our common heritage within the Christian tradition *and* what it means to be truly Baptist. Matthew, on the other hand, has not published or taught publicly on Baptist distinctives, or at least not in a sustained way that demonstrates that those theological commitments were ever at the forefront of his project. His work on the Trinity and the Reformation, while broadly Protestant, has not ever emphasized Baptist voices or modes of theological reflection. The work of CBR, on the other hand, has returned again and again to that particular question, namely, how does one hear and receive the Christian past in a way that is distinctively Baptist? I might mention here one of our first major projects, Baptists and the Christian Tradition, that Luke and I edited with Chris Morgan. In that book, we attend to major doctrinal loci and historic Christian practices and demonstrate how Baptists have been and remain connected to the Christian tradition in our articulation of those doctrines and in our practice of our faith.
Second, and related, Matthew’s projects tend to be more narrowly focused on particular issues or thinkers than does the work of CBR. For instance, early in his career (i.e. his dissertation and subsequent articles, monographs, and edited volumes) Matthew was concerned especially to retrieve Calvinism, and specifically the Synod of Dordt. In his work on the Trinity, he has focused his attention on rejecting EFS / ERAS and on retrieving Aquinas. While CBR leaders and fellows have participated in the debate over EFS / ERAS, indeed even to the point of critiquing and interacting with the major proponents in published volumes, that has not been our exclusive aim in what we publish or in considering the works we retrieve. For example, Brandon Smith, another of our co-founders and co-directors, has written extensively on, e.g., the Trinity and hermeneutics within a classical framework but without a critique of EFS / ERAS consistently at the forefront of his work.
One can see the difference, perhaps, in the way that Matthew describes his motivation for supporting the Nicene Creed motion at the SBC in his post versus how CBR entered that conversation. (We should note that CBR was not asked to be involved in the planning of that motion, but some of us simply felt it prudent to support something directly related to our mission and vision.) Barrett’s aim seems to include directly policing what is taught at SBC seminaries (“Here we are in 2025 and EFS … is still taught at Southern Baptist seminaries. At some point, we have to stand for something.”), whereas CBR’s aim was simply to affirm what is “biblical, Baptist, and beneficial.”
This brings me to a third distinction between Matthew’s retrieval project and that of CBR, namely tone and approach toward those with whom we disagree. Matthew’s (along with, for instance, Craig Carter’s) mode of retrieval often is aimed toward rebuffing and rejecting positions with which they disagree. Another way to put this is that their own version of retrieval tends toward contemporary polemics. Or, to say it again slightly differently, they aim to retrieve the past in order to rebuke present errors. Matthew’s (and, again, Carter’s) projects tend to follow a similar line of argumentation, namely, “contemporary evangelicalism has neglected this doctrine and has inadvertently fallen into this error, and therefore this project retrieves what has been lost and corrects current theological mistakes.”
CBR, while not setting aside polemics wholesale (who can and remain a faithful theologian?), is less taken with polemics and more broadly interested in retrieval for the sake of renewal. Again, while these are not divorced, there is an emphasis in our projects that is decidedly less about tearing down positions with which we disagree and more about retrieving doctrinal formulation, interpretative methods, and liturgical and ecclesial practices that can help Baptist churches today remain faithful to Christ and his mission. Perhaps this is a distinction without much of an obvious difference, but it is a difference nonetheless.
Finally, and to return to the original point, the goal of CBR is to make sure that Baptists feel like they don’t have to stop being a Baptist in order to remain and become more connected to the Christian tradition. In fact, our first foray into the public conversation on this was at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, delivering a paper called “Baptists and the Catholicity of the Church: Toward an Evangelical Baptist Catholicity.” The expressed concern given during Q&A was that, in pursuing such a project, we would become Anglican. But that is precisely what we aim not to do. We believe that you don’t have to leave Baptist life in order to appreciate, retrieve, and emulate the best of the Christian tradition. In fact, we believe that you shouldn’t leave, because we believe that Baptist distinctives are the most biblical expression of the church catholic’s confession of faith and its attendant practices. This is why we asked Jason Duesing to contribute the penultimate chapter to Baptists and the Christian Tradition, one in which he makes an extended argument about the contributions of the Baptist movement to the Christian tradition.
The Baptist movement, as Nathan Finn has put it, is a restoration movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The Baptist stream is a movement that sees itself rooted in Christian orthodoxy, the formal and material principles of the Reformation, and in the commitments of evangelicalism but also as a restorative voice within those streams. This restoration is one of a thoroughly ecclesial and political (i.e., polity) nature, one that attends to the covenantal shape of the Christian canon and therefore one that sees a distinction between the old and new covenants in terms of mode and sign of membership and in terms of the relation between the church and the state. This is precisely why Luke and I wrote The Baptist Vision, and why we did so with the specific structure of the book.
While I appreciate Matthew’s attempt to explain why he changed his mind on, e.g., the sacraments and polity, and while I appreciate his desire to see the SBC (and, presumably, other Baptist communions) give a full affirmation of historic artifacts of Christian orthodoxy (e.g. the Nicene Creed), his explanation of these points does not reflect an adequate understanding of Baptist history and theology. The reality is that the SBC and Baptists more broadly and historically are not anti-creedal. Baptists since our inception in 17th century Britain have regularly and vocally affirmed the ecumenical creeds as well as other expressions of historic orthodoxy.
One can read, for example, the Orthodox Creed and the Standard Confession of the General (non-Calvinist) Baptists and the First and Second London Baptist Confessions of Faith and the Orthodox Catechism of the Particular (Calvinist) Baptists in the 17th century to see just how vigorously our Baptist forebearers affirmed historic Christian orthodoxy regarding the Trinity and Christology and reformational principles regarding the Bible, soteriology, and ecclesiology. Their arguments related to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or to congregational polity, are not intended to be a break from historic orthodoxy or from the Reformation; they are intended to further the work of the reformation by arguing from Scripture for a restoration of New Testament ecclesiology, and especially in relation to baptism and polity.
With respect to baptism in particular, and in relation to the Lord’s Supper as well, the early Baptists saw no problem with referring to them as “sacraments.” The earliest Baptist views on the meaning of the ordinances could be broadly termed “spiritual presence”; that is, the Spirit is present and active in both acts because they are both visible proclamations of the gospel accompanied by a verbal proclamation of the Word of God. Furthermore, Baptists throughout our history have tended toward more historic forms of worship, even if in America the liturgy of Word and Sacrament has shifted more toward Song and Sermon. Luke and I discuss this at length in our article for Criswell Theological Review, “Liturgy for Low Church Baptists.”
So, to say it again, I am not here to try to argue with Matthew about his decision. It is his own. But I am here to say that Baptist retrieval projects are not all of a piece, and the retrieval project which I help lead, inspired by the same kind of work undertaken a generation ago by the Center’s namesakes, Timothy George and David Dockery, is one that emphasizes Baptist distinctives while also appreciating the Christian tradition. It is retrieval for the sake of a renewal in a distinctively Baptist mode.
