Most Baptist historians mark the beginning of the Conservative Resurgence in 1979. In that year, the messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting elected conservative pastor Adrian Rogers as president of the SBC. His election came about through careful planning by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson. In the years leading up to 1979, they developed a strategy to take control of the SBC. The key element in their strategy was to elect conservatives to the presidency of the SBC for many consecutive years. They accomplished this by mobilizing conservative churches to send messengers to the annual SBC meeting. Why was electing conservative presidents important?
Pressler and Patterson understood that the way to reform the SBC was to elect conservative SBC presidents. Each year, the SBC president appoints the members of the Committee on Committees, which then chooses members of the Committee on Nominations, which in turn nominates trustees for the mission boards, seminaries, and other agencies. Almost always, the SBC messengers elect the slate of nominees presented by the Committee on Nominations. By electing conservative presidents year after year, they could gradually fill the boards of trustees with conservatives.
The conservative faction in the SBC had many concerns, but they focused much of their frustration on the Christian Life Commission (now the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) and Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The conservatives considered both bastions of liberalism.
If you do the math, Southern Baptists elected Adrian Rogers 47 years ago. Thus, many, perhaps most Southern Baptists, were not even alive in 1979. I’m sure lots of Southern Baptists wonder whether the Conservative Resurgence was necessary or not. In this article, I’ll explain why Southern Seminary needed change, at least in my opinion.
I studied at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, graduating with my Master of Divinity in 1975. I had graduated from a conservative Christian college, John Brown University, so I had a conservative grounding. I don’t recall hearing anything in my classes at Southwestern that concerned or alarmed me. After graduation, my wife and I went to serve as SBC missionaries in the Philippines, so I was away from the USA during the early years of the conservative resurgence. Indeed, most of what I learned about it came from state Baptist papers. Generally, those state papers viewed the resurgence as unnecessary, and I tended to agree. After all, I encountered no problems at Southwestern. I thought the problems at the other seminaries must be exaggerated.
My viewpoint changed when a fellow-missionary studied at Southern Seminary during his furlough. My colleague enrolled in the Master of Theology program at Southern. As part of that program, he took a doctoral New Testament seminar. He reported that he was the only student of ten who believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The professor himself did not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ. That report stunned me, and it made me rethink my position about the conservative resurgence.
The conservative faction in the SBC could not revamp the boards of trustees quickly. Trustees serve terms of several years, and they normally serve two terms. So, it took a while for conservatives to gain a majority on the boards of trustees. This was true at Southern Seminary as well. By the early 1990s, the conservative trustees were a majority on Southern Seminary’s board. They began to press for reforms at Southern, and this brought them into open conflict with the faculty and administration. The fight became so intense that the trustees and faculty agreed to bring in a mediator to negotiate peace. The agreement that resulted from that process was called “the peace treaty.” One provision of the peace treaty was that the seminary administration would bring in conservative faculty members to “balance” the faculty. That’s where I entered the picture. I was one of three conservative professors hired to balance the faculty. Of course, that meant that I came to campus with a big C on my forehead, which did not endear me to the old liberal faculty.
What was my experience at Southern? I arrived on campus in July 1993. Dr. Al Mohler, the new conservative president, arrived that same month. The trustees gave him a mandate to reform the seminary, while the old liberal faculty remained determined to resist change. You might think of this as the irresistible force hitting the immovable object.
Let me share some anecdotes to help you understand. The first class I taught at Southern was theology of evangelism. The first day in class, I went over the syllabus with my students. On the second day, I started the class with prayer, and then I said, “Open your Bibles to Genesis chapter three.” Half of the class laughed out loud. I was shocked. I gathered my wits and stated, “In this class, we’ll work to construct a biblical theology of evangelism, so you’ll need to bring your Bible every day.” In that class, the conservative students sat on one side of the room, and the liberal students sat on the other. I thought that was very strange.
Faculty meetings were tense, and at times, faculty members expressed hostility towards the president. Normally, faculty meetings last from 60 to 90 minutes. In the first three years of Al Mohler’s administration, our faculty meetings lasted three or four hours. One day, I walked down the hall and came upon a circle of professors. I asked, “What’s going on?” One answered, “We’re discussing making a ‘no confidence’ motion against the president in the faculty meeting this afternoon.” Well, I knew that motion would pass. I responded, “Oh, don’t do that. The trustees will come to town and fire everyone. Then, they’ll just hire back those they want.” They did not make the motion that afternoon.
I learned more about Southern at a Christmas party for the faculty of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism. The faculty members who studied at Southern in the 1980s shared experiences from their student days. One reported that he kept a running count of the curse words one professor uttered in class. He stopped counting at 152. (When I was a student at Southwestern, a professor was fired for saying “damn” in class.) He also shared that a different professor beat his Bible on the lectern and shouted, “This is not the Word of God; this is not the Word of God!” Many of the faculty were universalists (believe that all persons will be saved). They thought my belief in exclusivism (the belief that Jesus is the only way to salvation) was quaint and naïve. Further, one of the ethics professors often spoke at abortion rights rallies and made pro-abortion statements on local television.
For their part, the students also expressed opposition to Dr. Mohler’s changes. For the first three years, we witnessed protests at the graduations, and many students refused to shake the president’s hand when they received their diplomas. Students even staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the president’s office. He ordered pizza to be delivered to them, and they ate it. The situation on campus continued to be tense for three years. It seemed like everyone but me was angry about something. Eventually, the situation improved. A student generation lasts for three years. The malcontents left or graduated. Also, in the third year, the board of trustees offered the faculty an early retirement deal. Many of the old faculty accepted the offer, so the seminary faculty changed considerably in a few months. The atmosphere on campus changed like someone had flipped a switch.
I attended a meeting away from campus, and my friend asked, “How are things at Southern?” I replied, “The people who were happy before are unhappy now, and the people who were unhappy before are happy now.” Really, that is still true. Many Southern Baptists are happy with the reforms at Southern Seminary, but others lament the changes wrought by Al Mohler and the trustees. As for me, I believe the reforms were absolutely necessary. It was not right to ask Southern Baptists to support the seminary as it was before 1993.
