The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

Ergun Caner, sole arbiter of being a "real" Baptist

Dr. Caner posted a blog entry about Liberty University reinserting the name "Baptist" into the seminary name. I am an on again, off again student in the Distance Learning program of the seminary and I didn't know the name had been dropped...

In an era when denominational identification is anathema, the Liberty Theological Seminary has retrofitted its name to the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. The irony is the man who lead the seminary to take Baptist out of the name is also the one who lobbied to reinsert it, the President of the Seminary, Dr. Ergun Mehmet Caner.

But as is normal with Dr. Caner, he can't avoid taking shots at the evil Calvinist hordes pretending to be Baptists!

“However, since 2004, much as changed, both here at Liberty University and in the Southern Baptist Convention. Too many schools have Baptist in their name but not in their doctrine. Some have drifted into liberalism and cultural relativism; still others remain orthodox, but have drifted toward non-Baptist reformed doctrine and cultural isolationism. For us, this was our line in the sand. We want to build bridges to a lost world without burning the bridges of our doctrinal heritage. We are putting Baptist back in our name, and taking back a term that has been misused.“We want to train students from across the evangelical spectrum, in the classic Baptistic stance of our Anabaptist tradition and Sandy Creek revivalistic heritage. These doctrines include:

• The inerrancy of Scripture

• General atonement

• Free church polity and pastoral authority

• Missions obsession

• Imminent return of Christ

It just made sense, following the vision of our founder and the new chancellor, to proudly state that we are Baptist with a capital “B.” Since 1525, the word Baptist has meant something and it still does at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary.”

I guess what "it means" is that anyone who doesn't hold to Arminian general atonement just isn't Baptist enough for Dr. Caner. It should have been clear from the title of the blog post "Liberty Baptist Seminary and “Building Bridges” that Caner was freaked out by the recent Building Bridges Conference and the idea, the horror!, that good, authentic Arminian Baptists would speak civilly and attempt to build bridges with the unwashed hordes of Calvinist pseudo-Baptists! I imagine he wrote each of the Arminian speakers and suspended their status as real Baptists for six months.

I would ask if that means that Dr. Caner doesn't believe that Charles Spurgeon was an authentic Calvinist, but having listened to his lectures in a History of Baptists course I realize that like Michael Pearl and so many others, Dr. Caner refuses to recognize that Spurgeon even was a Calvinist. Dr. Caner's quest has so infected his thinking that he refuses to even consider Reformed Baptists to be "real" baptists.