We sometimes slouch into adherence, too tired or busy or trusting to discover the who behind the what, thinking our ideas existed by themselves before our teachers even learned them, as though they were planted and harvested like wheat generation after generation for thousands of years.
My own former tradition (I’m really a hybrid, but the chronology is convenient) is an interesting amalgam of Augustine, Luther, John Calvin, Menno Simons and the Anabaptists, Jonathan Edwards, Darby, Scofield, and no doubt a few more colorful characters. There are bold streaks and soft echoes of them in fundamentalist GARB doctrine[1].
It’s a bit disconcerting to pick up a book on religious traditions, find your denomination and discover that someone who never met you or stepped inside your church has described you to a T. I could never have told you what the distinctive beliefs were that made the GARBC the GARBC, but there they were, like someone was humming a lullaby I’d heard in childhood.
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About the title of this post: Though we think we range widely and freely, we really stay pretty close to home where food, shelter, and others like ourselves are abundant.
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[1]
GARBC = General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. My hometown church, of which I am still very fond and for which I have high regard, is Bethel Baptist Church in Erie, PA, formerly on E 26th Street, long since moved to West 38th.
The GARBC homepage is here >
The Baptists Distinctives are outlined here >
GARBC Baptists also believe they are called to be separate from the world (part of it, but not of it). This contrasts starkly with the Calvinistic view of transformation from within, though both traditions IMHO suffer the cultural deficit imposed by iconoclasm.
[2012-12-15]
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