A Personal Tragedy, A Denominational Disaster

by T. C. Pinckney                                                                                           Vol. X, No. 8, Sep/Oct 1997

In the summer of 1952 a young man from Mississippi and his bride moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and entered Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. By 1955 he had earned a Master of Divinity. He remained at Southern for five more years and completed a doctorate in 1960. A Southern Baptist essentially all his life and in 1952 an unconscious fundamentalist, after eight years in a Southern Baptist seminary he was confused and embittered, his faith in shreds.

In 1985 Mercer University Press published Clayton Sullivan’s book, Called to Preach, Condemned to Survive. It recounts his personal tragedy, heart-breaking and highly interesting in and of itself. Yet of more immediate import to us as Virginia Baptists is what Sullivan has to say about the historical-critical method of Bible study dominant even as early as the 1950's within the Southern faculty. It was this destructive approach toward God’s Word that planted the seeds of dispute among Southern Baptists and which ultimately led to the Conservative Resurgence of 1979-1990 at the national Convention level, and which is still being played out in state conventions including Virginia. Consider carefully the following quotes from Called to Preach, Condemned to Survive, pp 79, 84-86.

“As a seminarian, still in my mid-twenties, I found myself baffled. I was more certain of what I didn't believe than I was of what I did believe. Southern Seminary had destroyed my biblical fundamentalism but it had not given me anything viable to take its place. That's the weakness of the historical-critical method its power to destroy exceeds its power to construct. The historical-critical method can give you facts and hypotheses but it cannot give you a vision. ...

“During the 1950s (so it was reported) some seminary trustees wanted the president, Dr. McCall, to ... keep a tighter rein on what was going on. They wanted Dr. McCall to exercise authority and control to keep the ‘mother seminary’ closer to the denomination, more in the middle of the theological spectrum, sensitive to the feelings and beliefs of grassroots Southern Baptists. This desire to keep the Louisville seminary closer to the Southern Baptist denomination created ‘problems‘ because many members of Southern's faculty were devotees of the historical-critical method. This method struck some Southern Baptists, particularly those at the forks of the creek, as ‘dangerous.’ This method rattled the ‘Old Time Religion’ with its cornerstone belief in an infallible Bible.

“Moreover, some of the seminary professors at Southern had a condescending attitude toward the Southern Baptist Convention and toward its agencies, its leaders, and its publishing house in Nashville. In seminary classrooms they cracked jokes about the denomination's promotionalism and aggressiveness—such quips as,

                       Mary had a little lamb;

                       He might have been a sheep;

                       But he went and joined a Baptist church,

                       And died for lack of sleep.

As a student, I found this antidenominational attitude baffling. A characteristic of some intellectuals, I've learned, is a tendency toward institutional alienation. Intellectuals—evidently by nature—are antiestablishment. They want water without the jug the water comes in.

“More puzzling to me as a seminary student was the condescending attitude some of my Louisville professors had toward Baptist preachers and toward the pastorate. The purpose of a seminary is to train men to pastor congregations. That's why I'd gone to seminary to prepare myself to be a preacher. Going to Louisville was my response to that unsought and disturbing experience I'd had in the kitchen of the Heidelberg Hotel back in my hometown. In that experience, beside a crate of oranges and surrounded by pots and pans, I'd bowed my head and accepted a ‘call’ to be a preacher. It was an anchor experience from which I've never been able to escape, no matter how hard I've tried.

“Yet my seminary professors tended to look upon preachers as hucksters, denominational drumbeaters, or dummies. That's why one of my seminary professors remarked, ‘The most brilliant Southern Baptist ministers become seminary professors and college teachers. The rest have to go into the pastorate.’ I remember another rolling his class on the floor with laughter while telling about ‘a corncob preacher’ who innocently remarked to him, ‘Professor, I've got a book at my house which came all the way from New York City.’ My professors reserved their most acidic remarks for ‘successful’ clergymen. When asked in class what he thought about Billy Graham, one of my teachers answered, ‘The call to be a Christian is a call to be crucified. Authentic Christians don't run after salvation as Graham's converts do, like hogs running after slop.’

“This anticlericalism was due, in part, to my professors' ignorance of what it means to be a preacher. Most professors under whom I studied at Southern had no prolonged experience in the pastorate. That was unfortunate because they had no appreciation of the role the church plays in the lives of common people. They had no real understanding of what ministers do in relating to folk in the crises of life when sickness, divorce, tragedy, and death come. Maybe if all my seminary teachers had each conducted a hundred funerals the administration-faculty conflict I am relating would never have taken place. But in any case, because of their anticlericalism and denominational hostility some members of the faculty were not primarily interested in Southern Seminary as a service to the Southern Baptist Convention, as a preparatory school for working pastors. They wanted it to be a divinity school—the Harvard of the evangelical world, with a hyperintellectual approach to the Christian faith. They placed it in a world somehow ‘above’ the Southern Baptist Convention and its fried-chicken-eating churches, a Laputa for Protestants alienated from their roots.”

Sullivan goes on to tell of the faculty-administration conflict that roiled Southern Seminary in the 1950s. Though interesting in its own right, it is not of concern to us at the moment. A final word about Clayton Sullivan. After receiving his doctorate he took a church which he eventually left. He went into teaching and is now a university professor, his beliefs being at best agnostic.

Carefully note that the account quoted above is NOT a condemnation of the new Southern Seminary. I praise God fervently for the changes He has brought not only in Southern, but also in our other SBC seminaries. Truly they have been revitalized and reinvigorated with faculties and staffs devoted to the full authority and inerrancy of the Bible. Nevertheless, there are several lessons for us in Sullivan’s account.

First, it sheds light upon the background growth of anti-biblical attitudes in the SBC and so helps one understand the necessity for the conservative resurgence.

Second and even more basic, it should alert us to the distinct possibility of some form of apostasy recurring in our newly redeemed institutions. Man’s heart is fallen, even the hearts of seminary professors. And therefore over time what Sullivan refers to as “institutional alienation” and an “antidenominational attitude” may reassert themselves. We see these urges in all sorts of organizations. The interests of the National Education Association long ago departed from improving education and focussed on a pet and self-serving political agenda. Political parties inevitably are suborned to the primary goal of attaining and retaining power, not for the good of the country but rather for the benefit of those in power or lusting after it. Many charities spend 70%, 80%, or even 90% of donations on overhead and advertising for more donations. Corporate staffs become bloated in numbers and emoluments to the destruction of the company. We MUST remain alert to the certainty that though the Lord has won a remarkable victory in the renaissance of the SBC, the spiritual battle will never end before the Lord returns.

Third, one of the most frequent tipoffs of spiritual trouble is the expression of elitism. The passages quoted from Sullivan offer several examples. It is not to the strong, those who consider themselves wise, the self-confident whom the Lord will grace with His Spirit, His strength, His purpose, but rather those of a “broken and a contrite heart” (Psalm 51:17). And God says, “...to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).

Virtually every one of the men in the most senior SBC executive positions today is, in my opinion, a wonderful, God-called individual. Yet they are but men, and men can make mistakes. And it is more likely that problems will begin with their successors who will not have paid the price and do not bear the wounds of the titanic struggle against liberalism. Southern Baptists must never again forget that our loyalty is to God, not to any man regardless of credentials (i.e., Ph.D.) or position.