Mohler stresses need for biblical authority

An emphasis on “soul competency” in the 20th century has “infected” the Southern Baptist Convention with an “autonomous individualism” that undermines biblical authority, contends a seminary president.
   
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Seminary, offered his critique in an annual Founders’ Day address at the campus in Louisville, Ky. Mohler analyzed the influence of his predecessor E.Y. Mullins, the seminary’s fourth president, who served from 1899 to 1928.
   
Mullins was the most visible Southern Baptist spokesman of his day. He was a denominational statesman, a shaper of Baptist theology and the driving force behind the “Baptist Faith and Message” doctrinal statement adopted in 1925.
   
Mohler currently serves on the committee charged with proposing revisions to the current “Baptist Faith and Message” version.
   
Soul competency is the name given to a belief individual Christians are responsible to God for interpreting and following the Bible. It underlies Baptists’ congregational form of church government, in which both clergy and laity are viewed as “priests” and equal before God.
   
Both Mullins and Herschel Hobbs, chairman of the committee that revised the “Baptist Faith and Message” in 1963, viewed soul competency as Baptists’ most distinctive doctrine. “The ‘Baptist Faith and Message’ of Southern Baptists is based upon the competency of the soul in religion,” Hobbs wrote in a 1971 book about what Baptists believe.
   
In contrast, many of today’s SBC leaders tend to emphasize the importance of correct doctrine and view the senior pastor as a spiritual authority in the church.
   
In his address, Mohler charged Mullins steered Southern Seminary and the SBC off the course charted by their founders by making personal experience more important than biblical authority. Mohler warned soul competency “serves as an acid dissolving religious authority, congregationalism, confessionalism and mutual theological accountability.”
   
“In Mullins’ theology, we see a shift from biblical revelation to religious experience as the starting point,” said Mohler, who has a Ph.D. in theology.
   
This, he continued, represented a “revolution from the influence of James Petigru Boyce,” the seminary’s founder and Mullins’ mentor.
   
Though such a belief “did not make Mullins a theological liberal,” it did link him with the modernists of the early 20th century, Mohler said. Mohler cited various instances where he said Mullins was influenced by Northern “liberals” before assuming the seminary presidency.
   
Mohler’s view, however, is strongly disputed by Russell Dilday, distinguished professor at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and former president of Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Dilday, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Mullins, has countered Mohler’s previous comments on Mullins in speeches and writings.
   
“To suggest Mullins makes experience his source of authority or puts it above the Bible … is an inaccurate reading of Mullins,” Dilday said. “He makes it very clear the Bible is the ultimate authority.”
   
“Mullins does give great emphasis to Christian experience in his thought, but the view of James Leo Garrett is more accurate in pointing out that he used it primarily as an apologetic tool, not as the source of Christian truth nor as a universal organizing principle,” Dilday said. “Mullins is clear on the fact that the Bible is the authority, not experience.”
   
Another scholar who also wrote his doctoral dissertation on Mullins concurred.
   
“Mohler does not understand Mullins and thus distorts his teaching and discredits his leadership and influence,” said Dwight Moody, dean of the chapel at Georgetown College, a Baptist school near Lexington, Ky.
   
Mullins is credited with crafting what Baptist historian Bill Leonard has termed the “Grand Compromise.”
   
By leading Southern Baptists to embrace a general statement of consensus beliefs, Mullins helped build a denominational environment that encouraged churches differing on secondary issues to work together in common causes of missions and evangelism.
   
“Doctrines were articulated in such a way as to make room for congregations that represented a variety of diverse theological traditions. Each could believe that its way was the Baptist way,” Leonard wrote in his 1990 book, “God’s Last and Only Hope.”
   
“This was less a synthesis than a Grand Compromise based in an unspoken agreement that the convention would resist all attempts to define basic doctrines in ways that excluded one tradition or another, thereby destroying denominational unity and undermining the missionary imperative,” Leonard explained. “Doctrinal positions were articulated in terms general enough to unite as many Southern Baptists as possible in fulfilling the missionary task.”
   
In his Founders’ Day address, however, Mohler said the Grand Compromise was destined to fail.
   
“This Grand Compromise did not last and could not last,” he said. “I do not question Dr. Mullins’ motives, … the sincerity of his heart, the clarity of his vision. … Yet there is a warning to us in the intentional shift Mullins made away from revelation as the sole source of religious authority and Christian theology and a shift to experience; for as we have discovered, human experience is no solid ground for establishing truth.”
   
Mohler said Mullins’ emphasis on soul competency had a positive impact in denying “external human authorities” in matters of faith, but it also carried long-term negative effect.
   
“The result was an autonomous individualism that has infected the Southern Baptist Convention and evangelicalism to this day.”
   
Southern Baptists today should “look with a critical eye and judge … what should be kept and what should be left behind in the legacy of every historical generation,” Mohler advised.
   
Mohler’s comments on Mullins’ legacy came on the heels of even stronger statements published in the Winter 1999 issue of the seminary’s theological journal.
   
“For over 70 years, Southern Baptists have harvested the shallow discipleship and vapid theology that resulted from sowing Mullins’ theological seeds of experience,” wrote Sean Michael Lucas, a seminary archivist and associate director of the seminary’s Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention.
   
“It is time to return to the emphases of the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention, trained in the hardy doctrinal tradition of the Princeton theology,” Lucas continued. “If we do, perhaps God would be pleased to grant us a new Reformation that will lead to a new Renaissance.”
   
Lucas also criticized the popular “Experiencing God” discipleship materials produced by LifeWay Christian Resources as “imbalanced” and having “little doctrinal content.”
   
Although “Experiencing God” has been the best-selling product of the SBC publisher in the last decade, it wrongly follows Mullins’ emphasis on personal experience, he suggested.
   
And incorrect discipleship will lead to incorrect theology, he wrote. “It would not be a far leap from discipleship with little doctrinal content to salvation with little orthodox doctrinal content.”
   
LifeWay President Jimmy Draper said he has not read the article assailing “Experiencing God,” but he has heard similar criticism from others.
   
Draper said he doesn’t want to get into a fight over it, but any suggestion LifeWay promotes experience over Scripture is misguided.
   
“My own experience or anybody’s experience always is measured by the word of God. But there are people who seem to feel God doesn’t reveal anything to us.”
   
“To imply that ‘Experiencing God’ says experience is more valuable than the canon of Scripture is simply not true,” Draper said. “Such a claim takes ‘Experiencing God’ out of the context in which it exists.
   
“When you got saved, you had an encounter with God. You experienced it. That wasn’t just doctrine. ‘Experiencing God’ is about helping people come to grips with God’s purpose and will for their lives. Anybody who tries to simplify it to a doctrinal treatise does not understand it.” (ABP)