Steven Harmon on Evangelicals and the Magisterium

My old theology professor, Dr. Steven Harmon of Beeson Divinity School, has recently participated in a forum on "Evangelicals and the Nicene Faith."  As one of the panel members, he presented an address entitled "The Nicene Faith and the Catholicity of the Church: Evangelical Retrieval and the Problem of Magisterium"  Because his address is going to be published in a forthcoming volume via Baker Academic Press he hasn't posted the full-text but he did provide an intriguing summary: 

"Recent attempts by Baptists and others who might be broadly described as "evangelicals" to retrieve aspects of the ancient, lower-case "c" catholic faith raise the question of how this might be done without such a project being yet another example of American "consumer" Christianity based on personal preference. What beyond personal preference authorizes such retrieval? After describing and reviewing what I perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of Roman Catholic and Magisterial Protestant approaches to teaching authority in the church, I suggested that there is a another distinctive pattern of teaching authority in the Baptist and broader Free Church tradition that might be summarized with the slightly clumsy English coinage "the magisterium-hood of all believers."

As indicated by my previous two posts on a group I'm calling the "Bapto-Catholics", this is a live problem for me as I seek - as a Baptist - to work for the retrieval of a more "catholic" vision of faith in my own life and among those of my own tradition.  The question of authority for such "catholic" evangelical, then, is one which simply must receive fuller consideration if any substantive move toward authentic engagement with the breadth and depth of "the Great Tradition."  I am certainly looking forward to Harmon's upcoming chapter and to the whole volume in which it will be published!