Southern Baptists had gone without a convention-wide confession for eighty years when they adopted one in 1925, and they adopted it in the year the teaching of evolution was the loudest question in American Protestantism. A committee chaired by E. Y. Mullins, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, took the New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833 as its frame, kept most of its articles, and added new ones on matters the older document had not addressed, including education, stewardship, cooperation between churches and the social order.
The second version came out of a quarrel over a book. Ralph Elliott, teaching Old Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, published a study of Genesis in 1961 that read the early chapters as something other than plain history; the convention repudiated the book, the seminary dismissed him, and a committee chaired by Herschel H. Hobbs produced a revised statement in 1963 that added a sentence making Jesus Christ the criterion by which Scripture is to be interpreted.
The third version came out of the long realignment its winners called the conservative resurgence. A committee chaired by Adrian Rogers produced the 2000 statement, which removed the interpretive clause added in 1963, said that the office of pastor is limited to men, and absorbed the article on the family that the convention had voted in two years earlier. Each revision was presented as clarification rather than change, and each was read by those on the losing side as the opposite.