Sunday Morning Wake Up

The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina has forced out the editor (since 2007) of its bi-weekly newspaper, The Baptist Recorder ... one Norman Jameson. The increasingly conservative denomination was increasingly unhappy with Jameson's writing mainly -- it appears -- because he was increasingly a voice of skepticism about "the creeping Calvinism" that is taking over in Baptist theological training and the movement to purge "unregenerate" Baptists from church rolls.

You can read a sample Jameson editorial here, one particularly aimed at that "creeping Calvinism" mentioned above. It's good writing. Offers insight, too, into those denominational cross-currents that were riling us up even back in the early 1960s when I was a student in a Baptist college in Texas. There's nothing much new under the doctrinal sun.

One of Jameson's targets for criticism was Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, whose various hair-brain preachments recently included the dangers that yoga offers your immortal soul and the suggestion that, if indeed homosexuality turns out to be a predetermined genetic predisposition, then maybe future homosexuals can be "cured" in the womb.

The North Carolina Baptist empire is certainly safer this morning for the viewpoints of Al Mohler.