The old Southeastern Seminary

                                                                                                                      Vol. IX, No. 4, April 1996 

This Anti-Heritage” selection is taken from pp. 106-7 of Servant Songs: Reflections on the History and Mission of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1950-1988 edited by Thomas A. Bland. Each chapter is written by a different member of the pre-conservative Southeastern faculty or staff. This quote is by Dr. Richard A. Hester who was professor of pastoral Care and Psychology of Religion at Southeastern from 1975 through 1991. This passage clearly presents the typical liberal view of biblical authority ... or the lack thereof. Italics have been added for emphasis.

“Second, at issue between fundamentalists and our faculty was understanding how truth claims are made. Our view was that if we take the reality of sin seriously, we then must assume that even the most informed and well-intended efforts to discern the truth are blurred by it. All our knowing is provisional and in need of continual revision, not only because that knowing is always partial but also because it is inevitably distorted by sin. In the academic arena our truth claims, therefore, must always be open to testing by differing views. To hold to our beliefs in such a provisional way is an act of faith in which we trust not ourselves but God as the final source of truth. This conviction lay at the center of the faculty’s commitment to academic freedom and its rejection of totalistic claims of the fundamentalist trustees and administration. ...

“Fourth, we disagreed with the fundamentalists over the nature of the Bible and its interpretation. They saw the Bible as a set of inerrant propositions embodying God’s revelation. We viewed the Bible as a set of human documents in which persons bore witness to their experience of God. We believed that these biblical witnesses were always limited in their vision by finitude and sin. We believed the biblical testimony was imbedded in a culture and world view different from our own and that it was a challenging task and an act of faith to bring the ancient text to life in the present context. The fundamentalists saw no historical gap between the text in its original setting and its contemporary meaning. One example of the consequences of ignoring the work of hermeneutical interpretation is their understanding of certain issues of gender and sexuality. Because they do not build a hermeneutical bridge between the text in its ancient context and its current setting, they oppose the ordination of women, they can see no problems in the views of God shaped by a patriarchal society, and they fail to understand the difference between homosexual acts addressed in the Bible and homosexuality as a gender orientation – a concept that was foreign to the biblical writers.

[Editorial Comment: To Dr. Hester’s credit, he demonstrates clear understanding of the difference between the understanding of the bible held respectively by inerrantists and liberals. The above quotations are remarkable in how succinctly they set forth not only those different approaches but also some of the conclusions to which liberal assumptions about the Bible inevitably lead.

Liberal Assumptions: The Bible is a human document. The “biblical witnesses were always limited in their vision by finitude and sin.” Therefore, “all our knowing” (our biblical doctrine) “is provisional and in need of continual revision...”

Liberal Conclusions: Women should be ordained. We are free to redefine our views of God. “Homosexuality as a gender orientation” is as right before God as heterosexuality.

Praise God that Southeastern Seminary is now a completely different school, committed not to liberal indoctrination in doubt, but to sound biblically based education of pastors on fire to win souls! TCP]