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20 May 2014

If you must put a label on me

I belong to the Southern Baptist Convention by circumstance and conviction.  Circumstance because the church my family joined, and which ordained me, was Southern  Baptist. Conviction because I believe very strongly in the autonomy of the local church, and that the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message is a very good statement of faith.

So I'm a Baptist. All "Baptist" really means, though, is that we don't baptize babies. There were two main streams of thought that came together to form modern Baptist theology: Calvinism and Anabaptism.

I'm not a Calvinist, nor an Armenian. I'm not an Anglican, a Roman Catholic,or any species of Eastern Orthodox. If I identify with anyone, it's the 16th century Anabaptistists.

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