So, when Southern Baptists quote Jesus saying, "No man comes to the Father but by me." they think he really meant, "No man comes to the Father but by the Bible and me."  In their eyes, if Jesus doesn't receive the blessing and imprimateur of a perfect and inerrant Bible, he's not worthy of worship by a Southern Baptist.  That's why Fundamentalist Southern Baptists have been waging war against people like me, who say that the Bible is authoritative -- but not inerrant, for more than a quarter century.  In their eyes, we don't give the Bible the esteem and reverence that is its due.

The second stage of the domestication process is being carried out by Holman Bible Publishers, a subsidiary of the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.  At Holman, the SBC has begun bolstering the authority of the Bible by inscribing it with the seal of the U.S. Army, the Air Force, the Navy, or the Marines.  Bob Allen, at Ethics Daily, posted a story yesterday that seems to me to reveal that Southern Baptists now think the blessing and imprimateur of a military seal could add weight to the message of the book that they worship.

Either that, or, by emblazening military seals on the Christian religion's holiest book, they are blasphemously demonstrating to the entire world that they view the Almighty God as though he were the domesticated deity of a single nation and/or military tribe.