Medieval Catholic Southern Baptists?

At Ethics Daily Robert Parham celebrates Baptist historians, among them E. Glenn Hinson, once of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Parham reminds us that in 1980 amid the gathering fundamentalist storm, Hinson "took on Bailey Smith, the Southern Baptist fundamentalist, who said in 1980 that 'God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.'"

Hinson told FaithLab in an interview:

I made five points in response to Bailey Smith: (1) Jesus was a Jew – you may have disenfranchised Jesus' prayers; (2) You disenfranchised everybody from Abraham to Jesus; (3) The Bible teaches that God hears the prayers of unbelievers; (4) This conflicts with centuries of Baptists' respect for every person's religious belief; (5) This is the stuff from which Holocausts come. I think the last point may have ignited the tinder.

Hinson eventually left Southern, and although he still considers himself a Baptist was blunt in his assessment of Southern Baptists:

The Baptist tradition depends on a minority consciousness. And having become the majority, Baptists in the South could no longer think like Baptists, they thought like medieval Catholics.

Farewell NAMB/IMB merger

Merger of the big, troubled North American Mission Board (NAMB) with the big, troubled International Mission Board (IMB) is apparently off the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) drawing boards.

Thus spake the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force (GCRTF) Chairman Ronnie Floyd in a speech Monday at a Florida pastor's conference. Although SBC President Johnny Hunt once called stories reporting the possibility of such a merger "ludicrous," Floyd confessed:

There was great, great, great discussion studying, planning and even to the point of having strategic formation of the possibility of the other. But we just really sensed in our heart that wasn’t right at this time.

"Sensed" presumably means heard the uproar set off by the GCRTF's fog-enshrouded considerations of merger and objection by SBC elder statesman Duke K. McCall and others to the further concentration of SBC executive authority such a merger would entail.