Last week we sketched the nature of the Gospel Story at Southern Seminary.
Lisa Weaver Swartz, in Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power., contends there are two stories at work at that seminary. The second story is the embodied, material, and narrated story of the conservative resurgence that occurred under Al Mohler. Thicker descriptions of evangelical pockets, as Weaver Swartz provides in this book, shed so much light on evangelicalism. We are indebted to her study.
Her book is about how evangelicals “do gender” and so she weaves gender differentiation as well as gender centrality and hierarchy into both narratives. Neither is a stretch. Gender permeates Southern seminary. The centrality of gender at Southern, and among the SBC in many pockets, attempted to take back what was supposedly lost in the rise of the feminist movement. Equality of men and women would have diminished the authority of men.
The Conservative Resurgence
Here are the three main seasons of the story:
(1) Conservative founders in theology and practice
(2) Liberalism creeps in to Southern, making it a bastion of liberal theology and social ethics.
(3) The Conservative Resurgence reclaims lost territory and establishes a narrative that is permeated with gender.
Three names tell the story: JA Broadus, Molly Marshall, Al Mohler.
Creation, fall, redemption.
In that narrative, Broadus and Mohler are the good guys. For some Mohler is messianic.
In its past, Southern was conservative: “when leaders were strong, when theology was conservative, when culture was ordered the way God intended.” Sounds a bit like Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegon.
By the 60s Southern had turned left due to the “winds of culture.” And it became known for “its progressive stance on civil rights, its flexible ecclesiology and theology, and its welcome to women seeking churchly and scholarly credentials.” I remember when my mother, who was raised SBC, spoke of Southern as “liberal” and spoke glowingly of Southwestern, where her brother had gone to seminary. A friend of mine interviewed at Southern in the 80s and said “I think they may have a Bultmannian on faculty.” I also remember when they hired Bob Stein and Tom Schreiner from Bethel, and those hires symbolized a new day at Southern.
If you want to read a blow by blow account of the conservative takeover/resurgence at Southern, read Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon.
In April of 1990 it all broke open with Board, Mohler, students, and faculty. And not a few concerned alumni and pastors in the SBC. Mohler became the seminary president in 1993 and “quickly consolidated control,” got rid of Molly Marshall in spite of her signing on the Abstract of Principles with a good conscience. True to press release form she resigned. Surely “questions of gender lay very near the surface.” A man named David Sherwood interviewed for a position at the Carver School of Church Social Work, but his affirmation of the ordination of women sunk him. Diana Garland’s departure was next, and she with her husband David Garland were involved in the start-up seminary Truett in Waco. Mohler was convinced of “uniform conservatism” including “male headship.”
Within three years – moderates leaving, conservatives arriving – the job was done. Southern became what it is today. A bastion of conservativism with a Gospel that is in part gendered and with a takeover narrative in which Al Mohler is the hero. Russ Moore is quoted as saying “Al was born to be president at Southern Seminary.”
Monuments around the campus visibly demonstrate the narrative and Weaver Swartz watched a founders day like event of a video narrative of this very narrative. She then tours the campus noting the locations that tell this creation-fall-redemption narrative. True to form, as well, that narrative is gendered as well.
Truth Legacy Vision
This narrative she calls “usable.” It tells a story and it forms an identity among the students, and she has heard the students tell that narrative over and over. She says the Gospel Story and the Conservative Resurgence story are not parallel so much as “extensions of each another.” At the heart of the narrative is an embattled existence.
It narrates who’s Out and who’s In. The out crowd: secular liberals, feminists, Arminians, mainliners, egalitarians, and many global Christians. They are the In crowd. That’s the battle.
A “symbolic foe” has become “gender egalitarianism.” Women preaching. 1 Timothy 2. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. The slippery slope worldview leads to making enemies of fellow evangelicals who are defined as not fully evangelical. In John Stackhouse’s approach to evangelicalism this in vs. out is a distinctive characteristic of fundamentalism, an Us vs. Them, an embattled existence. See his Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction.
And because gender and power are important to Weaver Swartz’s study, she observes how power comes into play by who gets to tell the story. My little line has been for decades, this: he who narrates the story controls the glory. Masculine voices govern the narrative at Southern. And this means appealing to some slave-owning leaders like Broadus and Manly and Williams and James Boyce. Southern and Mohler have been challenged by Dwight McKissic and Kyle Howard. The names of the founders remain on the campus buildings, and that itself is a narrative that forms identity on an embattled field.
Put simply, evangelical orthodoxy (the insiders) entails commitments to male headship, just as it does in The Gospel Coalition.
Weaver Swartz knows the stories, as well, of Frank Stagg and his wife, Evelyn, as well as Diana Garland. Mohler shut down the Carver School. Weaver Swartz speaks here of it being perceived then as a “province of women.”
The Baptist Faith and Message of 2000 is sketched with respect to its distinctives, which made Jesus less the central hermeneutic. One SBC leader observed that the new statement had more on the family than the sections on God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Scriptures. The individualistic emphasis of the SBC’s tradition morphed into an “approved belief system.” Soul competency and the priesthood of the individual believer have taken a hit in the Resurgence.
Weaver Swartz, accurately it seems to me, knows there is here a “sacralizing male-centered power,” and that says much about the story of the Conservative Resurgence. Good women “obey complementarian rules.”
Next: Beard Oil and Fine China – Embodied Practice at Southern Seminary – and then Lisa turns to Asbury Seminary.
“she observes how power comes into play by who gets to tell the story.” Sadly, I know many men who wouldn’t read this book simply because it was written by a woman (and sadly that used to be me). It shouldn’t be this way, but I wonder if there are any books by men in the “in” group that do this kind of historical evaluation of complementarianism (similar to Du Mez, Barr, Byrd etc) and if that would help gain a larger/fairer hearing...