TGC Reviews

Gregory A. Wills. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859-2009. Oxford, 2009. 592 pages.

In late 1879, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was as good as dead.

A post-Civil War financial panic left the seminary’s donor base unable — and in some cases unwilling — to pay off pledges to fund the fledgling institution’s endowment. To prop up the school, President James Petigru Boyce had bled dry his own financial resources and had maxed out willing creditors in borrowing money to pay faculty salaries.

Southern moved to Louisville from Greensville, S.C., in hopes that a fresh start would change things. It made them worse. Boyce and fellow founder John Albert Broadus, who would become the seminary’s second president, began to pray that God would provide a single donor whose means and generosity would set the school immediately on solvent ground.

God raised up one such man in Joseph E. Brown, a former Georgia governor, railroad president and U.S. senator; his $50,000 donation toward the endowment saved the seminary and gave it a solid financial footing for years to come.

Southern Seminary’s 150-year history is a story of God’s sustaining grace in the face of adversity, one which Gregory A. Wills details in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: 1859-2009 (Oxford University Press), released in spring 2009 to coincide with Southern’s sesquicentennial anniversary.

Wills, professor of church history at Southern and director of its Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention, mined a vast sea of primary sources in developing a 566-page volume that is both readable and captivating — the first full-length history of Southern Seminary since William A. Mueller’s “A History of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” published in 1959 to commemorate the seminary’s 100th anniversary.

Wills shows how the seminary stayed afloat during the difficult years following the Civil War largely through the indefatigable leadership of Boyce. The seminary survived financial controversy, but also overcame theological controversy in the 1879 resignation/firing of professor C.H. Toy who embraced and began to teach theological liberalism.

Southern’s battle for theological fidelity was just beginning.

After the founders valiantly fought it, the seminary succumbed to theological liberalism in the early 19th century during the years of E.Y. Mullins’ presidency. Liberalism held the institution captive for much of the 20th century, as Wills shows in detail, but found liberation and rediscovered its confessional heritage in the early 1990s following the election of current President R. Albert Mohler Jr.

Few institutional histories make for compelling reading by an audience that have no connections to the institution under consideration. Southern Seminary, however, is not just another institution, it’s history is not just another cheery celebration of how smoothly things have always operated and Wills is not your average historian.

Thanks to Wills’ impeccable research that included nearly one million pages of primary source material, Southern’s new history is broad, deep and, best of all, it is well-written. It is a comeback story with a happy ending, a tribute to the grace of God, but along the way, there were many times when it appeared that Southern was well on its way to following in the footsteps of the mainline churches and their schools, many of which are entangled in a death dance with liberalism. Wills gives bold relief to antebellum/postbellum and twentieth century contexts in which Southern Seminary has ministered and tells the story of the institution’s unprecedented Egypt to Canaan turnaround in a deeply engaging manner. His tone is irenic toward those who steered the seminary in a direction away from orthodoxy and his deep grasp of the primary sources and their meaning provides readers with a God-exalting story that makes irresistible reading for anyone who enjoys the history of the evangelical church.