L. R. SCARBOROUGH: HE SET OUR EXAMPLE

Providential? Maybe so. Certainly interesting. The March/April issue of Southwestern News, the alumni publication of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, arrived the week after Dr. Dilday was fired. It was written much earlier.

This issue features an article entitled L.R. Scarborough: Fighting Norrisism, by Southwestern alumnus Glenn Thomas Carson.

The article details Scarborough’s long battle with J. Frank Norris. Scarborough was the second president of Southwestern Seminary, succeeding founder, B. H. Carroll. The article tells how Scarborough led the way in unseating messengers from the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, where he had been a member and where Norris was pastor, to state and associational annual meetings.

It talks about Scarborough publishing a tract called “The Fruits of Norrisism.” In the tract Scarborough wrote that the pulpit of Norrisism was one of “hatred against innocent personalities and institutions.” At the tract’s release, Scarborough also made a series of radio addresses in which he called Norris a “destructionist.”

Make no mistake, Scarborough continually pointed out, Norrisism had a negative impact on everything and everyone it touched.

And through it all, the writer pointed out, Scarborough only saw himself in a defensive posture — standing up for the seminary and the denominational method.

The Southern Baptist Convention and Southwestern Seminary has been destroyed because not enough traditional Baptists in the 1980’s had the courage of L. R. Scarborough. Scarborough probably had people telling him and writing him what a few people write and tell us. Things like, “try to reason with Norris; you are too mean spirited; you are being just as bad as Norris; it will all work out, so try to keep peace.”

Scarborough was smart enough to know what he was dealing with in Norris: a man so convinced he was right, he could not be reasoned with; a man so in need of controlling everything and everyone that he was willing to destroy what he could not control.

When the spiritual children of J. Frank Norris organized politically in 1979, and took over the SBC, we forgot the example of L. R. Scarborough. We tried to reason. We tried to be nice. We tried to work it out. And when some of our leaders urged us to fight back as had Scarborough and George W. Truett, we thought it was “un-Christian” to defend our Baptist heritage! And so we lost the convention.

A fundamentalist pastor once told the editor of this newsletter in 1989 that “I don’t care if there are but a 1,000 churches left in the SBC when we get through with this, as long as they are pure.”

Friends, you cannot reason with that mentality. You cannot build bridges with that viewpoint. You can only refuse to let them have the control they want. That is what Scarborough understood about Norris, and what we failed to recognize in his spiritual children.

The hardest thing for traditional Baptists to understand about the fundamentalists is “They don’t care!” They don’t care what they destroy. They don’t care what we do with our money. They don’t care that Southeastern Seminary only has half as many students as it did when Randall Lolley resigned. They don’t care what happens at Southwestern Seminary as long as they are in charge.

STUDY YOUR HISTORY! THESE PEOPLE ONLY CARE THAT THEY ARE IN CONTROL! What that means is that if you withdraw financial support from them, do not do it hoping it will change their approach. They won’t care.

Do it because you want to redirect your money to whatever new thing God is doing among Baptists, not because you are angry, are hoping to change things, or are trying to punish.

And finally, realize that the only Christian thing for us to do in Texas, where it can still make a difference, is to follow the example of L. R. Scarborough and stand up and defend what it means to be Baptist. There is nothing mean spirited or un-Christian about defending the principles our forefathers died for.

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