SBC group abandons anti-calvinist document signatory campaign
Tom Ascoll writes for the blog “Founders Ministries”:
[T]he editors [of] SBCToday have removed the signatory list from their “Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation.” The statement has been available on their website for signatures since it was released June 1, 2012. Certain SBC institutions and individuals also promoted it during the annual meeting of the convention in New Orleans last month.
The “Statement“ contained a not-so-subtle attack on the Doctrines of Grace (sometimes “Calvinism”) along with a fervent affirmation of old-school Arminian free-willism. This it called “traditional” and representing a “majority” of Southern Baptists. But this conclusion seems to have been premature:
In their announcement today the editors of SBCToday state,
There was never a “magic number” of signers in anyone’s mind and there was never any organized campaign to enlist signatories. It seems to us that to leave the list open further unnecessarily shifts attention to who has or has not signed the document, which is not the point. We never assumed we were speaking for all Southern Baptists.
The statement itself does claim to represent the “majority” of Southern Baptists, however. The last report I heard indicated that the document had garnered around 800 signatures. If 1000 people signed the statement that number would represent .0000625 of all Southern Baptists.
Can you say, “Fail”?