Ousted seminary professors praise Texas committee’s report
By Mark Wingfield
Managing Editor, The Baptist Standard

DALLAS—Among those immediately affirming the work of a Texas Baptist committee recommending reductions in funding for Southern Baptist Convention seminaries were ousted faculty members who found vindication in the six-month study.

The Texas theological education study committee found “a great deal of mistreatment of people” by administrators and trustees at the SBC seminaries, said Mike Chancellor, vice chairman of the study committee and pastor of Crescent Heights Baptist Church in Abilene.

“People in the church I serve hold certain expectations about Christian conduct” that have not been exemplified at the SBC seminaries, he said. “It’s not about beliefs. It’s about the way as Christians we treat other people.”

Statements such as these brought expressions of gratitude from people like Jeff Pool, who was forced out of teaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth over an issue of academic freedom. Pool now teaches at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University and remains active in a Texas Baptist church.

“As one of those who refused both political and theological allegiance to the fundamentalists who seized control of the SBC and its seminaries—and also as one who suffered the consequences for my decision to resist both power as domination and religion as creedalism, I sincerely thank the committee for exposing the intentional mistreatment of persons who disagreed with the fundamentalist leadership of the seminaries, as well as the un-Christian ways by which the fundamentalists seized control of the SBC’s seminaries,” Pool said.

“I admire the leaders of our Baptist General Convention of Texas for the courage and wisdom of their Christian faith, as they have pursued and fulfilled this difficult and painful task. Their wise and courageous faithful service makes me proud again to be Baptist, especially a Texas Baptist.”

What the Texas committee discovered “squares with my own experience” as a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., added Carey Newman.

Newman, who holds the master of divinity degree from Southwestern Seminary and doctor of philosophy degree from Baylor University, was hired as a conservative New Testament professor at Southern Seminary in 1993, the year Al Mohler became president. However, he was forced to leave Southern three years later because he would not affirm additional theological dictates imposed by Mohler and seminary trustees.

“I am pleased the committee did such objective, painstaking and even soul-searching research in the question of funding theological education,” Newman said. “As a once-proud Southwestern and still-proud Baylor graduate and a former Southern Seminary professor under the Mohler regime, I heartily concur with the findings and recommendations.

“The seminaries are on a perilous, headlong drive toward a new orthodoxy of fivepoint Calvinism; they are bent on hiring professors who have little or no heritage in Southern Baptist circles; and certain seminary administrators have resorted to the sub- Christian practices of intimidation and hostility to silence those who disagree,” he continued.

“Texas Baptists must prepare for the future by investing in institutions that are genuinely responsive to the needs of Texas Baptists. I have always thought that someday grassroots Baptists were going to wake up and discover the true nature and effects of the deeds wrought in their name. I suspect that on that day their anger at what has happened to our once-great institutions will only be surpassed by their shame for having allowed it to happen.

“This committee’s report makes me think that day may just be right around the corner,” said Newman, now an editor for Westminster-John Knox Press.

October 2000