Plenary, 23 Feb 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 23, 2000

Official Report 400KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

We welcome to lead our time for reflection this afternoon the Reverend Watson Moyes, President of the Baptist Union of Scotland.

The Baptist movement, whose people in Scotland I represent, was founded on the principle of tolerance. That might come as a surprise to members who have any awareness of the movement because we have, with others, sometimes been described as the religious right, as fundamentalists, as bigots, as self-appointed moral custodians and other such choice descriptions as one might expect in an open society.

However, my Baptist forefathers pled for freedom of conscience and sovereignty of choice. They found themselves in prison with other non-conformists for refusing to surrender conscience to the authority of state or Church. The freedom to decide how or whether to respond to God—or, indeed, to believe in God—was, to them, absolute and non-negotiable. That principle remains as it was expressed in the Baptist world congress statement that was given on the eve of the second world war:

"No person, no government, no institution, religious or civil, social or economic, has the right to dictate how a person may worship God or whether he shall worship God at all. In continuance of our consistent Baptist practice, we are imperatively constrained again to insist upon the full maintenance of absolute religious liberty for every person of every faith and no faith."

However, tolerance that is based on respect for conscience is vastly different from the colourless anything-goes attitude that effectively amoralises life. You may accept and respect people; you may defend their right to hold views with which you utterly disagree, but you retain the freedom to attempt to persuade them about your own freely held convictions. Is not that what an open society is? Baptist people, while defending the rights of others to hold their own convictions, have not hesitated to evangelise or campaign—witness such notable examples as Dr Billy Graham and Dr Martin Luther King. Christians present Christ as the way, the truth and the life; they believe that certain things are contrary to God's will. Others are free to reject those convictions, but not to silence us.

All of that has to be set in the context of both our fallibility and our accountability to God. We try to hold our convictions with humility, with a degree of provisionality that awaits fuller knowledge and with the awareness that there is an ideal that we all fall short of and against which we are all judged. St Paul in Romans 14 says:

"Don't criticise others for having beliefs that are different from yours . . . After all, God welcomes everyone. Make up your own mind. Any who count one day more important than another day do it to honour their Lord. Those who eat meat give thanks to God, just like those who don't . . . Why criticise other followers of the Lord? . . . The day is coming when God will judge all of us. Each of us must give an account to God for what we do."

I conclude with a prayer. Lord God, grant us wisdom to know your truth, grace to walk in your way, strength to serve others, and humility to listen to and learn from them. Amen.