In Praise of Old Southern Seminary

In some ways, what I want to say here doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. The past is the past and the present is the present. We can’t go back to the way things used to be, and we shouldn’t want to. Put succinctly, it is what it is.

But it also was what it was. And that’s what I want to talk about.

I have two degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). I earned a Master of Divinity degree (a professional ministerial degree, similar to a lawyer’s law degree or a doctor’s medical degree) in 1982 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Old Testament major, New Testament minor) in 1986. Those degrees in hand, I’ve spent the last three decades as a pastor, a preacher, a professor, and now, an editor. 

Those of you who are Baptists of my generation and earlier don’t need me to rehearse what happened to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) or to its seminaries, including Southern. For those of you who aren’t, I’ll just say that in 1979, right wing elements of the convention undertook a long game to gain control of the convention. By 1990, the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was complete. During the intervening decade, the convention’s six seminaries in general, and its flagship seminary SBTS in particular, were repeatedly attacked. You are no doubt aware of how Donald Trump talks about the press as the enemy of the people. That’s how the people who orchestrated and led the takeover of the SBC talked about the seminaries. And they were as wrong about the seminaries as Trump is about the press. The seminaries fell with the convention. Those of us who attended them back in the day received a different kind of education than current students do. That’s why, when I tell someone that I graduated from Southern Seminary, I always specify that it was the pre-1990 version. 

This is all ancient history. It’s on my mind because I just read some things that some of my contemporaries recently said about their experience at SBTS. They spoke as if their experience at Southern Seminary was something they had to survive and overcome. I’m in no position to comment on their experience. We all brought our own lives to Louisville, and we all heard what we heard with our own ears, processed it with our own minds, and filtered it through our own experiences. 

I just want to testify that my experience at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was excellent. It was not just less negative than these contemporaries of mine say it was for them. It was the opposite of negative and hurtful: it was positive and helpful. One of the reasons is that I had already figured out before arriving at SBTS that a person, and especially a preacher and teacher, could (and should) simultaneously possess a deep faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, a profound devotion to the Bible, and a critical (meaning a carefully analytical) approach to the biblical text. I had learned that as a seventeen-year-old freshman at Mercer University in an Introduction to the Old Testament class taught by Dr. Howard Giddens.

Please understand that I was not prepared to hear what I heard Dr. Giddens say. The beloved church and pastor of my childhood knew nothing of critical approaches to the Bible, so I didn’t either. So when Dr. Giddens told us about how the Pentateuch developed over an extended period of time, which meant that Moses didn’t write it (or at least not much of it), I was a tad confused. When I told my father what Dr. Giddens had said, he gave me one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me (and he gave me many). Before I tell that part of the story, let me say that my father, while a very smart man, had only a high school education and was a lifelong textile mill worker. What he knew about the Bible, he had learned on his own. When I told him that Dr. Giddens had said that Moses didn’t write everything in the Pentateuch, his eyes glimmered as he said, “You know, I’ve always wondered how Moses managed to write about his own death.”

And the light came on that has never gone out. My high school-educated, textile mill-working father loved the Lord and the Bible as much as anyone I’d ever known. Now he was setting me free to take seriously what Dr. Giddens and other scholars, who loved the Lord and the Bible as much as he did, and who knew a lot more about Scripture than he did, said.

That was the mindset with which I entered Southern Seminary. What I found there were teachers who gave their lives in service to the Lord. What I found there were professors who had a burning interest in understanding what the Bible actually says and means. Yes, they used the best that current scholarship had to offer, but that was part of the wonder of it all. My experience was that they used such methods in service to the Lord, to Scripture, and to the church. I am and always will be grateful for how they shared their faith and knowledge with me and inspired me to engage in a lifelong pursuit of a growing, honest, Christ-centered, biblically-guided life and ministry.

As I said earlier, maybe none of this matters now. But when you read or hear preachers say bad things about their experience at the old (pre-1990) Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I want you to remember that I always have said, still say, and always will say good things about mine.