Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.
— Matthew 7:15-20
Yesterday, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary and the most prominent spokesman for Southern Baptist conservatives, wrote a post titled “The Heresy of Racial Superiority — Confronting the Past, and Confronting the Truth.”
To Mohler’s credit, he genuinely seems to be trying to do that — to confront the past and the truth, and what it means for him and his institution to be carrying on the legacy of men he acknowledges were, undeniably, white supremacists. He’s not just whistling Dixie here. Mohler takes a (mostly*) forthright look at the reality of his conservative Southern Baptist heroes of the past and attempts to being grappling with what it means that they were so thoroughly, enthusiastically, sinfully wrong on a matter of great and central importance.
Here’s the heart of Mohler’s post:
More humbling still is the fact that many churches, churchmen, and theologians gave sanction to that ideology of racial superiority. While this was true throughout the southern churches, Southern Baptists bear a particular responsibility and burden of history. The Southern Baptist Convention was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument. …
I gladly stand with the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in their courageous affirmation of biblical orthodoxy, Baptist beliefs, and missionary zeal. There would be no Southern Baptist Convention and there would be no Southern Seminary without them. James P. Boyce and Basil Manly, Jr. and John A. Broadus were titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
But there is more to the story. Boyce and Broadus were chaplains in the Confederate army. The founders of the SBC and of Southern Seminary were racist defenders of slavery. Just a few months ago I was reading a history of Greenville, South Carolina when I came across a racist statement made by James P. Boyce, my ultimate predecessor as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was so striking that I had to find a chair. This, too, is our story.
These are the 19th-century Founding Fathers of Mohler’s seminary and his denomination. For more than 20 years, Mohler has devoted himself to reshaping that seminary and that denomination in their image. These are the men who wrote the “Abstract of Principles” that Al Mohler used as a cudgel when he became president of Southern Seminary in 1993, casting out the supposedly “liberal” and “moderate” faculty and explicitly, forcibly aligning the school with the theology of Boyce, Broadus and Manly.
So I appreciate the candor and courage of what Mohler is attempting to do here. He’s basically the president of the Boyce and Broadus Fan Club, and he doesn’t wish to step down from that post. His own legacy is defined by and inextricably linked to the legacy of the very men he here condemns as “heretics.”
He pulls that punch, a bit, at the end, with a technical argument about charges of heresy requiring that the heretic be personally “confronted” with the charge. But it doesn’t seem like he expects this technical defense to convince anyone else any more than it seems to convince himself. He sees the core problem, and seems to realize that it is a fundamental problem for fundamentalists like himself:
And now the hardest part. Were the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary heretics?
They defended all the doctrines they believed were central and essential to the Christian faith as revealed in the Bible and as affirmed throughout the history of the church. They sought to defend Baptist orthodoxy in an age already tiring of orthodoxy. …
But I would argue that racial superiority in any form, and white superiority as the central issue of our concern, is a heresy. The separation of human beings into ranks of superiority and inferiority differentiated by skin color is a direct assault upon the doctrine of Creation and an insult to the imago Dei — the image of God in which every human being is made. Racial superiority is also directly subversive of the gospel of Christ, effectively reducing the power of his substitutionary atonement and undermining the faithful preaching of the gospel to all persons and to all nations.
To put the matter plainly, one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ. One cannot hold to racial superiority and simultaneously defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
Readers of this blog know that I bear little affection or respect for R. Albert Mohler Jr. But I respect this statement and the attempt he seems to be genuinely beginning here.
We’ll come back to this in more detail, but I don’t think Mohler yet recognizes the full scope of what it means when he says, correctly, that “one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The truth of that depends on a deeper understanding of both of those things, and I don’t think Mohler recognizes the full scope of either one — neither the “ideology of [white] superiority” nor “the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
For a sense of why Mohler is not prepared to evaluate the theology of his hero, James P. Boyce, let me turn to Daniel José Camacho’s recent discussion of one of his theological heroes, James H. Cone. Here is a bit of Camacho’s “Why James H. Cone’s Liberation Theology Matters More Than Ever“:
One cannot properly understand Cone’s claims about Black Power and God being black without understanding how Christianity got wrapped up with White Power in the first place — and made God white.
Cone’s project is not simply about experience but is a direct assault on theology’s entanglement with white racism. Cone was critiquing whiteness before virtually anyone in the theological academy realized what it was or the fact that it was a problem.
… How was it that the black church went ignored so long? Cone rethought U.S. church history by seeing it in light of the crucified. The black church that the white theological builders had rejected was actually the hermeneutical cornerstone for properly understanding God and Jesus.
… Some have juked Cone’s theological critique by blaming the problem on ethics. In other words, “Orthodox” theology is faultless but has been at times simply misapplied or not faithfully lived out. These critics say we should be sympathetic to Cone’s passion but reject his answers as “unbiblical and untenable.” But part of Cone’s brilliance was to avoid such an unhealthy disconnect between theology and ethics. If Cone is right (and I think he is), then we can’t keep using the master’s theological tools as they are to dismantle his church. If the theological well keeps yielding poison, we need to question that well and remember that God is the source of life.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* Mostly. He flinches a few times in this piece and occasionally lapses into his usual habits.
For example, after first mentioning the trio of James P. Boyce, Basil Manly Jr. and John A. Broadus as “titans of the faith” without whom “there would be no Southern Baptist Convention and there would be no Southern Seminary,” he goes on to say that “Boyce and Broadus were consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day. They would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence.” What happened to Manly, there? Well, he was known to have whipped “his” slaves and thus the whole “consummate Christian gentleman”/benevolent-trafficker-of-persons shtick Mohler offers in partial defense of Boyce and Broadus won’t work for him.
And, apparently, neither Boyce nor Broadus was so “horrified” by Manly’s violence against enslaved persons that they expressed any qualms about working with this slave-whipping theology professor to found their seminary.
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