Baptist Faith & Message 2000

The 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message was the resurgence's doctrinal capstone. Two changes in particular represent the translation of the Patterson-Pressler political campaign into enforceable theology. First, the article on the family was revised to include: 'A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.' This language — added in 1998 and confirmed in the 2000 revision — made female submission to male authority a formal doctrinal requirement, not merely a pastoral recommendation. Churches and seminaries affiliated with the SBC are expected to affirm it. Second, the article on the church was revised to restrict the office of pastor to men. This had been functionally the practice in most SBC churches, but codifying it made it a test of orthodoxy. The 2000 BFM also removed the 1963 sentence 'The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ' — a clause moderates saw as maintaining some hermeneutical humility. Its removal signaled that the inerrancy position was now the only acceptable position. Significantly, the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message — which the 2000 version superseded — had no language about female submission and explicitly stated that 'the criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ.' Moderate Baptists argued the distance between 1963 and 2000 was a departure from Baptist tradition, not a return to it.

Themes this entry appears in

• Patriarchy
• Christian Nationalism
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections from Baptist Faith & Message 2000

• influenced → Carter Leaves the SBC (2000) — Carter cited the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 — and specifically its statement that a wife 'is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband' and its limiting of the office of pastor to men — as the direct cause of his resignation from the SBC. The BFM2000 was the formal doctrinal codification of what the conservative resurgence had been building toward for two decades. Carter framed it as a matter of human rights and women's equality, not merely biblical interpretation. He left.

Connections to Baptist Faith & Message 2000

• Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood influenced (2000) — Du Mez argues that the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 codified complementarian gender theology — female submission to husbands, male-only pastoral office — as official SBC doctrine, giving the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood's theological framework the institutional authority of the denomination's confession of faith. CBMW had been producing complementarian theology since 1987; the 2000 BFM made that theology a test of SBC orthodoxy. The result was a feedback loop: CBMW produced the theological arguments; the BFM2000 made those arguments binding; SBC institutions then enforced them through hiring, credentialing, and church affiliation.
• Paige Patterson influenced (2000) — As SBC president, Patterson appointed the committee that drafted the 2000 BFM (chaired by Adrian Rogers), which retained the wifely-submission language the convention had added in 1998.

Sources

• An analysis of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 — Christian Ethics Today (2000)
• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 162-170
• Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 55-65