Don’t Submit to This
Joel C. Gregory,
Fort Worth

What happens to Baptists happens to Texas.

That being so, the tragic forced resignation of Alan Brehm from the faculty of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth should alarm every thinking person. This venerable institution has been hijacked and is being driven toward a mindless, rigid, narrow provincial fundamentalism.

Just like many of your readers, I know Southwestern. I pastored two of its presidents at Travis Avenue and Gambrell Street Baptist churches, taught on its faculty, and pastored First Baptist Church of Dallas, which supplies at least three chairmen to its board of trustees. That should give me some perspective.

In June 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Salt Lake City adopted a Neanderthal resolution on the relationship of husbands and wives. That resolution called for a “submission” of wives equal to a cringing subservience. Of the six Southern Baptist seminaries, only Southwestern forced its faculty to sign that statement.

In Baptist polity, the denomination has no power to force a seminary to require such a signature. Alan Brehm is a Baptist and Texas hero for refusing to sign.

Historically, Baptists shed their life’s blood to protest just such coercive signing of tyrannical documents. The Baptist distinctive, sealed with martyr’s blood, is the competency of each soul to determine such matters.

The Baptists of Fort Worth should let Southwestern President Kenneth Hemphill know that they will not tolerate this. The residents of Fort Worth should hope for something better. Such an institution newly baptized in reactionary rigidity will effect the life of the city and its churches.

Editor’s Note: Formerly an editorial in Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

April 1999