Southeastern, The Way It Was

                                                                                                                                                                 Vol. IX, No. 8, September 1996

This issue’s Antiheritage item is from John Paul Avant, Jr., The Relationship of Changing Views of the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture to Evangelism and Church Growth, a dissertation presented to the faculty of the school of theology Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX, December 1990, pp 198-9.

    Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Southeastern Seminary taught its first classes in the Fall of 1951. From its inception Southeastern would be known as the "liberal" Southern Baptist seminary. It appears that few, if any, of the early faculty were willing to affirm a view of the inerrancy of Scripture such as that held by Boyce or Manly. Morris Ashcraft, who resigned as Faculty Dean at Southeastern in 1987, says:

         Since 1950 I have also taught in Midwestern Seminary and Southeastern Seminary.  I have never studied under, nor served as a colleague with, a professor who identified himself or herself as an inerrantist with reference to the Scripture. (55)

During the early years of the seminary, many of the faculty began embracing the views of Bultmann. By 1962, it was clear that this was the case, and the trustees "warned and instructed three New Testament professors to re-examine their teaching methods and theological presuppositions in light of the Abstract and Principles." (56) Those three professors eventually resigned in 1964, but it was apparent that they were not the only ones who were basically Bultmannian in theology. Daley says that half of the faculty was sympathetic to Bultmann's views. (57)

    There is evidence that suggests that many of the professors at Southeastern before the eighties not only rejected the inerrancy of the Bible, but also some of the fundamental doctrines of Christian orthodoxy. In conversation with the writer, Jim Parker, a professor who taught at Southeastern in the seventies said that there were very few professors on the faculty who affirmed the virgin birth of Christ. A statement by Alan Neely seems to support this professor's claim. Neely was professor of missions at Southeastern until resigning to teach at Princeton in 1988. Neely says:

    Most [Southern Baptist laymen] would have accepted uncritically some but not all the beliefs of classical fundamentalism -- the infallibility of the Bible, Virgin Birth of Christ, substitutionary atonement, bodily Resurrection of Christ, and the premillennial Second Coming. Until the 1980s, for example, I never knew a Southern Baptist seminary professor who affirmed all of these doctrines. Often they would qualify the ones they did affirm. (58)

 54 David W. Johnson, "The Addition of the 'Criterion' Statement to Article I of The Baptist Faith and Message (1963)," (Ph.D. seminar paper, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1986), 12.

55 Morris Ashcraft, "Revelation and Biblical Authority in Eclipse," Faith and Mission 4 (Spring 1987): 16.

56 C. R. Daley, "The Southeastern Seminary Situation," Baptist Messenger 54 (Feb. 11, 1963): 3.

57 Ibid.

58 Alan Neely, "Southern Baptists' Quiet Conflict," Christianity and Crisis 50 (March 5, 1990): 64.

[Editorial Comment: This historical vignette should make us deeply thankful for the marvelous changes which have taken place at Southeastern under the leadership of Louis Drummond and now Paige Patterson. Perhaps never in history has there been such a complete reversal in the stance of a seminary. TCP]