Benjamin Marcus "Ben" Bogard (March 9, 1868 – May 29, 1951) was an American Baptist clergyman, author, editor, educator, radio broadcaster, and champion debater in primarily the U.S. state of Arkansas.
[4] During a church service in February 1885, the teenaged Bogard was baptized in an icy pond, a signal of his faith in Jesus Christ.
[3] In 1895, while a pastor in Fulton in far southwestern Kentucky,[6] Bogard edited for two years The Baptist Flag, the first of several denominational papers in his future.
[7] In Fulton, he met John Newton Hall, a proponent of the Landmark Baptist movement, which emphasizes a literal interpretation of chapter and verse.
"[8] In his 1934 debate with Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, he proclaimed, "Miracles and divine healing, as taught and manifested in the Word of God, ceased with the closing of the apostolic age" in the year A.D. 70, after which overt miracles were no longer performed on earth.
[10] Bogard was an unyielding critic of ecumenism within the religious community, unwilling to compromise for the sake of unity what he considered unchanging tenets of the faith.
[8] In his debate with Church of Christ theologian Joseph Sale Warlick,[11] from John 10:27-30, Bogard argued that a Christian who falls into sinful behavior still retains eternal security because of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross and subsequent Resurrection, which are greater than an individual's imperfection.
Bogard maintained that the blood of the crucified Christ exonerates the sinner whose salvation is assured at the time of repentance.
[12] In 1938, Bogard debated the Church of Christ theologian Nicholas Brodie Hardeman of Henderson, Tennessee, on the nature of the Holy Spirit as the third part of the Trinity and in regard to baptism and falling from grace, the latter which Bogard-style Baptists consider impossible.
[Bogard] cravenly permitted the Wicked One [Darrow] to come right into the fold among his flock -- and maybe devour some of his little ewe lambs!
But instead of rising to it nobly, as Calvin rose to his when God sent Servetus to Geneva, you cowered in the background and failed ignominiously.
[3] At the time, no Missionary Baptist pastor earned more than the $100 gross monthly salary paid to Bogard by Antioch Church.
[19] During the 1920s, Bogard joined the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted in that phase of its existence foreigners and Roman Catholics.
In 1926, Bogard joined with Doss Nathan Jackson to write Evolution: Unscientific and Unscriptural, which claims that Darwin's's theory causes discouraged persons to turn to atheism and Bolshevism.
In the campaign Bogard unexpectedly found himself defending the right of free speech[3] of Charles Lee Smith, the founder and president of the since defunct American Association for the Advancement of Atheism who opposed the initiated act and had been charged with blasphemy while distributing atheist literature in Little Rock.
Arkansas voters defied their state senators and passed the anti-evolution act by a two-to-one margin and also supported the Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, the governor of New York, though Bogard had been among the southern clergy who opposed this first ever Catholic nominee of a major party despite U.S.
The seminary filled the void left by the closing of the undergraduate institution, Missionary Baptist College, which had operated from 1919 to 1934 in Sheridan.
[21] In 1901, he received an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the then Southwest Bible College in Bolivar in Polk County in southwestern Missouri.
He subsequently received an honorary degree from the since disbanded Missionary Baptist College in Sheridan in Grant County in southern Arkansas.