Mullins scholars see Calvinism behind Mohler's speech
by: Mark Wingfield,
Managing Editor, The Baptist Standard 

Al Mohler's criticism of E.Y. Mullins and the Baptist doctrine of soul competency has more to do with advancing a strict Calvinistic theology than with Baptist history, according to historians and theologians who have studied Mullins extensively.

Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., gave a Founders' Day address there March 30 in which he said Mullins, the seminary's fourth president, put Southern Baptists on a wrong course with his emphasis on personal experience and his advance of the doctrine of soul competency.

The speech mirrored Mohler's introduction to a 1997 reprint of Mullins' classic book, "The Axioms of Religion." In that introduction, Mohler warned that soul competency "serves as an acid dissolving religious authority, congregationalism, confessionalism and mutual theological accountability."

Soul competency is a belief that individual Christians are responsible to God for reading, understanding and living out God's word. It implies that no other human authority can dictate how an individual interprets Scripture or relates to God.

Mohler's criticism of Mullins and soul competency "is a back-door way again to get the Calvinistic agenda out there," said Alan Lefever, director of the Texas Baptist Historical Collection in Dallas.

Lefever and other Mullins scholars challenged Mohler's description of Mullins' theology as being weak on biblical authority.

The problem Mohler appears to have with Mullins, these scholars said, is that he departed from the more rigid form of Calvinism embraced by his predecessors.

The doctrine of soul competency-labeled by Mullins and later by Herschel Hobbs as the most distinctive belief of Baptists-does not fit well with strict Calvinism, added Russell Dilday, distinguished professor at Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary and immediate past president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.

"The idea of soul competency is that nothing stands between us and God, that we can go directly to God without pope or priest," he explained. "That would contradict Mohler's view on Calvinism," which emphasizes the sovereignty of God to the exclusion of any need for personal experience.

One of the most controversial tenets of five-point Calvinism is that God predetermines which humans will be saved and which humans will be damned to hell. A related tenet teaches that those predestined to be saved-the elect-will irresistibly be drawn to faith in Christ and cannot choose otherwise.

Mohler is part of a growing network of Southern Baptist Calvinists who want the Southern Baptist Convention to return to five-point Calvinism, which they cite as the doctrinal moorings of Southern Seminary's founders and some of the founders of the SBC itself.

Southern Seminary founders James Petigru Boyce and John Broadus embraced Calvinism, also known as Reformed theology or "the doctrines of grace."

While Mohler wants Southern Baptists to return to the theology of Boyce and Broadus, Southern Baptists largely turned away from this theology for good reason, said Bill Leonard, a Baptist historian who previously taught at Southern Seminary and now is dean of the new divinity school at Wake Forest University.

"For one thing, they could not accept the damnation of infants," Leonard said. "They could not accept the idea of election. They rejected the Boyce/Broadus tradition of election and limited atonement. They turned away on the question of limited atonement toward general atonement."

General atonement is the belief that Christ's death on the cross was effective for all who would believe in him for salvation, with the implication that all people have equal opportunity to accept or reject Christ. Limited atonement is the belief that Christ's death on the cross was effective only for the elect, those predestined to salvation.

Leonard said Mohler is guilty of buying into a "fallacy of Baptist origins."

"There is an idea that there is one kind of Baptist history, one kind of Baptist identity and if we can find it, we can be real Baptists," Leonard explained. "The moderates have that same fallacy at times, as do the conservatives.

"Historians have to keep reminding Baptists that they are the only post-Reformation people who began at both ends of the theological spectrum," he added. "This idea that there's one kind of Baptist and I know which kind it is, is to miss the point of the whole Baptist identity."

While Mohler makes much of the presumed change in direction at Southern Seminary from Broadus to Mullins, "the only true progression you see between Broadus and Mullins is the de-emphasis on Calvinism," Lefever said.

This change was in keeping with the changing view of Baptists at the time, he added.

During Mullins' tenure at Southern, Texas Baptists founded Southwestern Seminary, with B.H. Carroll as president. Carroll was a "modified Calvinist," Lefever said, who was followed in the presidency by L.R. Scarborough, a "whosoever will may come" evangelist.

To suggest that Mullins opened the door to theological liberalism among Southern Baptists would be an "unfortunate misrepresentation," added Dilday, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Mullins.

"This man spoke an orthodox Baptist view at a time when it was being questioned," he continued. "To attack this man whom, at his death, George Truett and others said was one of the greatest men who ever lived, is a cheap shot. Mullins probably was the most important Baptist apologist of the century."

Mullins must be understood in the context in which he lived and worked, Leonard said. "He was trying to come to terms with a changing world post-slavery, post-industrial revolution and new science.

"You can fault Mullins if you want to for no longer being helpful in a postmodern context, but had we continued in the Boyce/Broadus tradition, we would have remained a racist Southern sect. Mullins, for better or worse, was trying to get away from that."

Curtis Freeman, professor of Christianity at Houston Baptist University and a sometimes critic of Mullins himself, agreed with Leonard's point.

"As we assess the Mullins legacy, we may well find that soul competency has too much rugged individualism in it to reach a lonely postmodern culture of moral strangers," Freeman said. "Here we may find help in the 16th and 17th century Anabaptists and Baptists who emphasized the responsibility of each believer's priesthood within a community of disciples.

May 2000