Lessons from Seminarians

                                                                                                                                                  Vol. VIII, No. 4, April 1995

Today we offer two antiheritage quotes which supplement each other. The first is from Clayton Sullivan's autobiographical book, Called to Preach, Condemned to Survive: The Education of Clayton Sullivan (Mercer University Press, Macon, GA, 1985) pp. 71-75. [Emphasis added.] Sullivan attended Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY, from 1952 to 1960, finishing with a Ph. D. He tells how he entered Southern a Bible-believing young pastor and left eight years later an agnostic. Note in the following excerpts his description of the destructive impact of the "historical-critical" approach to biblical studies.

"September 1952 rolled around and seminary classes began. ... As a neophyte seminarian I was dominated by a passion to prepare myself academically to be a Southern Baptist preacher. ... I was certain the Christian religion was ‘true’ and that it was devoid of intellectual puzzles. ... Knowledge, I believed, led to understanding. And that's what I was looking for - clarity of insight. ...

"By all these professors I was mesmerized and swept off my feet! To me they were the smartest people I'd ever met. Some had written books, and I'd never before been around people who had written books. ...

"At Southern Seminary we were introduced to new ideas and new ways of thinking. We learned of a mutation in biblical studies that had occurred about 150 years earlier as a byproduct of the enlightenment. Then for the first time the Bible had been studied in a ‘scientific’ manner. Biblical materials had been critically examined against their historical and ideological backgrounds, using an approach called the historical-critical method. Associated today with names like Julius Wellhausen and Rudolf Bultmann, this method was first used in Europe and has come to dominate biblical studies in schools like Cambridge, Oxford, Tubingen, Gottingen, Marburg, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago. ... My professors at Southern made statements in almost every lecture that would have embroiled them in controversy with the Ministerial Club back at Mississippi College.

"For years Southern Baptists, isolated in the Deep South and practicing ideological inbreeding, seemed unaware of the historical-critical method. Yet by mid-century a vanguard of Baptist scholars had absorbed the method at Edinburgh, Yale, and Tubingen and had begun to employ it at institutions like Southern Seminary. ...

"... When I left Mississippi for seminary I was a fundamentalist, although I was unaware of it. Study at Louisville led me to see the Bible as a document with a human side and as a sprawling anthology of Jewish and Christian writings, reflecting in part views and speculations of those who wrote it."

The second quotation is of Dr. C.R. Daley, former editor of the Western Recorder, the Kentucky State Baptist Paper, and a graduate of Southern Seminary. Dr. Daley made these statements on July 20, 1984 to a class at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Daley is a well known moderate-liberal. Note that Daley corroborates what Sullivan wrote.

"The institutions have become unrelated and unresponsive to the grass roots feelings. Doctrinally or inerrancy-wise, the poison that Pressler and Patterson claim is biblical criticism. That's what they are after ... When the seminaries started teaching biblical criticism and started talking about the documentary hypothesis and other conclusions that some who study that reach, that's when the poison started. When I came to this seminary I can remember only one professor who stood up strongly for the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch... The seminaries have been moving in that direction. They have been going to the Continent and bringing back that stuff. That's the direction of the seminaries. ...

"If you want the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis and Job and Jonah as historical figures, go to Mid-America Seminary. You get it there. ...

"I may be saying something about this seminary (Southern) that is unfair, but I agree with the way it is going. ...

"Can there be a Southern Baptist institution of learning where there is a balanced presentation and where the professors do not tend to influence students in a given direction? I doubt that."