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This chapter focuses on James Petigru Boyce and his efforts to establish a Southern Baptist seminary. In 1856, Boyce emerged as the leader of a new effort to establish a Southern Baptist seminary. By the time of his election as professor of theology at Furman University in 1855, he had concluded that it was his duty under God to do all in his power to establish the seminary. Without his leadership and sacrificial devotion, the seminary would have failed to be established or, once established, would have suffered extinction. His energy, wisdom, and determination overcame the many obstacles and crises that threatened the seminary's existence.

This chapter focuses on the fate of the Baptist seminary with the onset of the Civil War. The seminary barely escaped extinction during its first thirty years. The Civil War caused its suspension and annihilated its endowment. In the economic destitution of the Reconstruction South, Baptists had little ability to raise a new endowment. The seminary relocated to Kentucky in 1877 with promises of a new endowment, but securing the pledges and their payment was thwarted by a business panic and economic depression, and by opponents within the denomination who launched powerful attacks against the school.

This chapter focuses on Edgar Y. Mullins's continued leadership. In the second half of his tenure as president, Mullins rose to leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. Effective leadership in the populist denomination demanded sensitivity to the majority. Although he agreed with the conservative majority on many points, he also sought to express the majority views in ways that did the least harm to progressive aspirations. He sought to provide space for progressive theology in the seminary and did not want to drive progressives from the denomination. But he also needed to keep the denomination's trust in the seminary's orthodoxy and denominational loyalty. It was a difficult balancing act that drew the criticisms of progressives and conservatives alike. In the end Mullins accomplished as much to reassert orthodoxy as to promote progressive theology.

This chapter focuses on the conservative takeover of the Southern Seminary. Moderate leaders knew that time was running out on moderate control of Southern Seminary. Efforts to elect a moderate convention president had failed. Before the 1988 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in San Antonio, Roy Honeycutt still hoped for a moderate victory to rescue the seminary from conservative control. But conservative candidate Adrian Rogers was elected and Honeycutt recognized the inevitability of conservative control.

Jimmy Carter’s faith played a major role in both the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns and his presidency. This is evident in his speeches, relationship with religious constituencies, approach to politics, and many of his domestic and foreign policies. Three major factors shaped Carter’s ideology: Southern evangelicalism, Baptists’ views of the separation of church and state, and the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. In most ways, Carter’s personal faith was typical of Southern Baptists and most other evangelicals. He believed in the need to be born again, the importance of evangelism, the sinfulness of human beings, and the authority of the Bible. Carter insisted that his faith should play an important role in his political decisions. He strongly stressed morality, virtue, justice, forgiveness, humility, peace, human rights, concern for the poor, and stewardship. Carter’s faith also helped to inspire his efforts to promote peace throughout the world. Motivated by Christ’s example, Carter strove as president to adopt the attitude and approach of a servant. His positions on several issues, most notably abortion, school prayer, and tuition tax credits, were at odds with those of many evangelicals and Catholics. Carter’s Christian commitment is especially evident in his efforts to strengthen families, reduce poverty, reform welfare, combat the nation’s energy crisis, and slow world population growth.

This chapter focuses on McCall's pursuit of the realist policy. The seminary's faculty largely followed his counsel and focused on the basic gospel beliefs and Baptist distinctives that they shared with their constituency, and advanced progressive views with caution and respect. When critics raised the alarm of heresy, McCall pacified them. In the 1960s and 1970s McCall provided a relatively safe haven for Southern Seminary's progressive faculty. But by the end of his tenure in 1982, the realist diplomacy was failing. The evidence of the liberalism of the faculty was too great to deny plausibility. And at the same time, Southern Baptists like many Americans, were more willing to fight for conservative values.

This chapter focuses on William Heth Whitsitt, who succeeded John Broadus as president of Southern Seminary in May 1895. Whitsitt's tenure was short and tumultuous, and the controversy he precipitated cost him his position. The presenting issue in the controversy was his claim that in 1641 Baptists invented immersion as the mode of baptism. Most Southern Baptists found the claim troubling, and many thought it contrary to scripture. But Whitsitt's ultimate offense was betrayal of denominational trust—common Baptists could not get past the sneering tone with which he corrected his own denomination. He was president of a seminary established as a guardian of Baptist orthodoxy, but he had disparaged Baptist views in a way that broadly discredited the denomination.

This chapter focuses on Duke K. McCall, who succeeded Fuller as president of the seminary. McCall entered office anticipating a struggle over the seminary's direction. A dissident faction of the faculty sought effective control of the school and was leading it toward the values and ambitions of the “nondenominational seminaries of the Northeast.” Trustees and other faculty members opposed the dissidents' aims. Trustees vested in the president the authority to determine the direction of the seminary, and they expected the seminary to serve the needs and beliefs of Southern Baptist churches, not of New England divinity schools. McCall sought to lead the school jointly with the faculty while keeping his executive authority theoretical.

This chapter focuses on Edgar Y. Mullins who followed William Heth Whitsitt as president of Southern Seminary and committed the seminary to the very principles for which Whitsitt had suffered expulsion. Mullins succeeded where Whitsitt had failed because he was able to cultivate brotherly feeling toward Whitsitt's enemies and win the trust of rank-and-file Southern Baptists. His popularity across the Southern Baptist Convention enabled him to promote progressive theology at the seminary. He led Southern Baptists away from traditional orthodoxy in significant ways and reshaped Southern Baptist theology.

This chapter focuses on the new set of challenges encountered by the seminary following the death of Edward Y. Mullins in 1928. Trustees appointed Old Testament professor John R. Sampey as president, who was then succeeded by Ellis A. Fuller upon his retirement in 1942. Both Sampey and Fuller presided over the seminary in an era of terrific challenge and rapid change. The Great Depression brought fiscal crisis that threatened to sink the school under the heavy debt load it amassed to build its campus at the Beeches. The crisis of war, the youth revival, and the return of prosperity launched a massive wave of new students into ministerial training and began an era of rapid expansion at the seminary. As the faculty expanded to meet student enrollment, a generation of young scholars reshaped the character of the school. They took the premises and methods of historical criticism for granted, and they embraced postwar reformist impulses that made them less patient with the constraints of realist denominational relations.

This chapter focuses on Robert A. Mohler who succeeded Honeycutt as president of the Southern Seminary. Mohler made it clear from the start that he intended to enforce the Abstract of Principles according to its original intent. He knew that many professors subscribed to the Abstract in full awareness that they disagreed with its literal assertions. Mohler sought to return to Boyce's understanding of the Abstract's meaning and use in the seminary.

This chapter focuses on two Anglo Protestant groups with genetic links to Puritanism: Presbyterians and Baptists. Both are well known in American history for the splits they suffered over revivalism, biblical interpretation, and slavery. But predestination always lurked just below the surface, and controversy erupted every time some faction attempted to articulate the definitive Presbyterian or Baptist position. When a movement arose among Presbyterians in the late 19th century to soften the Westminster Confession's statement on God's eternal decree, traditionalists cried foul. The revisionists eventually won a partial victory, but not before igniting a denominational firestorm and exacerbating North‐South differences. Baptists, meanwhile, had disagreed over predestination since the seventeenth century. In the Southern Baptist Convention, these tensions simmered until the turn of the 21st century, when the conservatives who engineered a successful takeover of denominational institutions descended into a bitter family feud over the Calvinistic doctrine of election.

This chapter focuses on Roy L. Honeycutt, who succeeded McCall as president of the seminary. Honeycutt entered office knowing that his job was to prevent change. By the time of his installation as president in February 1982, Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson had initiated a movement designed to dislodge denominational leaders and seminary professors who endorsed liberal theology and replace them with persons who held orthodox views. As the conservative insurgency gained successive victories, the threat to the seminary's progressive faculty and administration grew. The conservative majority in the Southern Baptist Convention wanted a seminary of a very different sort. If Honeycutt and other denominational leaders could not find a strategy to stop them, the seminary that they had labored to establish would cease to exist. Honeycutt resisted the control of the popular majority. And when resistance failed, he obstructed.

This chapter focuses on Southern Seminary professor Crawford H. Toy. Toy has been dubbed as modernism's first martyr: “The first to suffer for the higher criticism in the United States.” Toy's beliefs ran afoul of Boyce's vision of a seminary bounded by an orthodox creed and controlled by the denomination. When he began teaching the new theology's view of inspiration and its critical reconstruction of the history of Israel, the seminary dismissed him. Boyce's leadership in the dismissal and the faculty's defense of traditional views of the Bible established a historical precedent that has endured in denominational memory. It helped shape Southern Baptist identity and became an emblem of the denomination's commitment to orthodoxy and to the popular control of its institutions.

This chapter focuses on the many difficulties and changes experienced by the seminary's following its move to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1877. By 1895, none of the seminary's founders remained, marking the end of the institution's first age. The founding faculty steered the seminary through the severest trials. Time after time, when the death of the seminary was at hand, they refused to abandon it, and God blessed their stubborn faithfulness with sufficient support to continue the enterprise, at least until the next crisis. By the early 1890s, their labors and sacrifices succeeded in establishing the seminary on a permanent foundation, with a secure endowment and a marvelous campus.

This chapter examines the clergy of the Southern Baptist Church in the United States. It discusses the controversy that followed the annual assembly of Southern Baptist pastors in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1989. This chapter suggests that this selection in Las Vegas was full of symbolism. The convention represented a geographical step outside the traditional Southern Baptist domain south of the Mason-Dixon Line and it highlighted the Southern Baptists' emphasis on counting the number of souls delivered from unbelief, not to mention the sins of gambling, drinking, and prostitution.

This chapter recounts the development of a Baptist community in Zimbabwe, founded by Southern Baptist missionaries from the United States. Missionaries built religious institutions to support extensive denominational work: a theological seminary, a hospital, a media center, bookstores, and schools. Following Zimbabwe’s formation out of formerly white-ruled southern Rhodesia, the Southern Baptists began to hand over the work to local leaders and began to reduce subsidies for the mission-founded institutions. Most have declined or disbanded, but Zimbabwean Baptists have struggled to sustain theological education. Debates ensued over the meaning of partnership and the problem of dependency, and a significant tension has grown in the cross-cultural relationship between the Zimbabwean and the Southern Baptist churches.

This chapter discusses the decline of Southern Baptist church discipline. By the 1920s, Southern Baptist church discipline had disappeared. Although a few isolated churches kept up the practice well into the 1940s, the fate of Southern Baptist discipline had more-or-less been sealed by 1900. Southern Baptists transformed their heritage of communal authority and relinquished the right to judge the moral behavior of individuals. Democratic religion took on new meaning after this time.