how a question changes things

Sometimes a question clarifies an issue.

Consider some famous questions:

• Can electricity be used to light a room?
• What role do germs play in infection?
• Did the the low temperature the morning of the Challenger disaster cause the O rings to shrink significantly?
• Does smoking cause lung cancer?
• Are the stars randomly spread in the sky?
• How do we decide the odds that a DNA sample came from a particular defendant?

Jesus, as change agent, often helped people open their hearts to new ideas by asking good questions. Good questions are powerful because they demand answers and can redirect thinking and open our minds to new possibilities. They can also show us the dangers of our preconcieved ideas.

This was the case in 1848 when Southern Baptists were wrestling with the growing influence of landmarkism. The champion of this new and exciting teaching among Baptists was a man by the name of J.R. Graves. Graves was a dynamic and powerful preacher who loved debate and could hold a crowds attention for up to three hours at a time. He was a force to be reckoned with as a strong leader, teacher and publisher of his own Sunday School literature. His influence across the southwest was unquestioned. Graves hooked up with a famous preacher from Bowling Green Kentucky by the name J.M. Pendleton, who had written a popular pamphlet entitled "An Old Landmark Re-set".

Graves, Pendleton, Dayton and other "Landmarkers" believed like the followers of Alexander Campbell (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ) that "there is no society but the Church of Christ". They argued a high church position that there was an unbroken chain of (Baptist) church succession down through time from the baptism of John the Baptist to the true church, the Baptist Church. They opposed the boards and missions organizations of the SBC as currupted by proponents of alien immersion and improper disciplines and doctrine. They attacked ministerial education as "dangerous" and taught that the ONLY true church was the Baptist Church, and that every other church was just a religious institution.

They held to these basic "landmarks":

1. Baptist Churches are the only true churches in the world.
2. The true church is a local, visible institution.
3. Baptist churches and the "Kingdom of God" are the same thing.
4. There must be no affiliation with other non-Baptist churches
5. Only a church can do churchly acts (such as Baptism and the Lord's Supper).

This movement grew and gained momentum in the mid to late 19th century. Baptists in the south were captivated by the idea that they were a part of not only THE Church but the ONLY true church down through the ages. In fact, it might have taken over the convention if it had not been for a good question that was asked. A question that framed the issue and focused attention on the natural conclusion of such erroneous thinking.

The question:

"Is the immersion of a person in water in to the name of the Trinity, upon a credible profession of faith in Christ, by a Paedo-Baptist minister who has not been immersed a valid baptism?"

Many Baptists in the south had in fact been baptized by itenerate Presbyterian ministers serving mulitple congregations. The answer given was by John L. Waller, champion of Baptist doctrine and editor of "The Western Baptist Review" in Kentucky. Read slowly and carefully:

If the validity of baptism depends upon the "baptizedness" of the administrator, then no one can be sure he has been baptized. If any link in the succession be broken, the most skillful spiritual smith under the whole heaven cannot mend the chain... An improper adminstrator twenty generations removed, is as fatal to the genuiness of the ordinance as such a one but one generation removed.

It was a question and an answer that turned the tide. Baptists soon realized that the hand of the administrator is not as important as the heart of the believer. Who was the questioner?

Richard B. Burleson of Alabama.

Interesting, isn't it, how a good question at just the right time can change things?