The Baptists and soul competency

Although I was raised Presbyterian, I spent my youth worshipping with the Baptists. During that time I don't recall ever coming into contact with the notion of soul competency, a doctrine which appears to be one of the Baptist distinctives. Here is how the Southern Baptist Convention's website defines it:

We affirm soul competency, the accountability of each person before God. Your family cannot save you. Neither can your church. It comes down to you and God. Authorities can't force belief or unbelief. They shouldn't try.

There is a more in-depth explanation of soul competency in C. B. Hastings' Introducing the Southern Baptists. This somewhat exaggerated emphasis on the individual's relationship to God seems to me to have two significant negative implications.

First, if something like soul competency had been present in the early centuries of the church, it would have made it impossible for the church as a corporate institution, among other things, to recognize authoritatively the canon of scripture, to address the Arian and other heresies, and to pronounce on the christological doctrines that we have come to accept as part of the legacy of the early ecumenical councils. Baptists, in so far as they are orthodox Christians, appear to accept this larger legacy, but not the institutional means by which it was achieved. Yet it is difficult to envision the Apostle Paul refraining from exhorting the Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, &c., on the grounds that he was interfering with their soul competency. Similarly, it is not difficult to imagine the response of the bearers of the decision of the Jerusalem council (Acts 15) if their hearers had had the temerity to claim exemption based on soul competency.

Second, it would seem to make the institutional church into a mere voluntary association of like-minded believers whose individual consciences have led them to similar conclusions. The pain of schism and of churches out of communion with each other is played down as nothing more offensive than the tendency of fallible human beings to disagree with each other. (There is some of this reasoning in the Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, who should have known better.) Moreover, the institutional church, rather than teaching authoritatively and disciplining its members in true faith, takes its place alongside "sports clubs, friendly societies, colleges, symphony subscription-guilds, political parties and so on," as one more voluntary association from which withdrawal poses no "grave or irremediable loss," as Oliver O'Donovan puts it.

At the same time, there is much to like about Baptists. In my experience, Baptists have a genuine zeal for the scriptures and for evangelization that puts other Christians to shame. Here in Hamilton, the Baptist churches appear to be bursting at the seams. The same can hardly be said of the Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches. (It can be said of the Catholics, however.) The very emphasis on the individual believer's status before God encourages in Baptists a holy concern to exert themselves in the cultivation of personal piety and the spread of the gospel. Would that other Christians with more corporate ecclesiologies might learn from their Baptist brethren in this.