Southwestern's Predicament - Christianity Today

When many evangelicals at points north, east, and west think about seminaries in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the first one that usually comes to mind is Dallas Theological Seminary. The school has played a Texas-size role on the national map of conservative American Protestantism in recent decades. It has been the longtime bastion of premillennial dispensational theology, in a line of succession stretching from professor Charles C. Ryrie and alumnus Hal Lindsey back through presidents John F. Walvoord to seminary founder and C. I. Scofield disciple Lewis Sperry Chafer.

The prominence of DTS (which does not stand, as some wags have joked over the years, for Dispensational Theological Seminary) comes not only from sales of the Ryrie Study Bible or Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. In recent decades, through the conciliatory work of DTS theologians like Darrell Bock and former president (and current chancellor) Charles Swindoll, its dispensational theology has moved into the background. These days its influence is felt mostly through the national ministries of alumni such as Ken Taylor (The Living Bible), Tony Evans (the Urban Alternative), Joseph Stowell (Moody Bible Institute), Bruce Wilkinson (The Prayer of Jabez), and the late J. Vernon McGee (Thru the Bible Ministries).

But there is another important institution of evangelical theological education in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with longer, more purely Texan roots, which is relatively unknown in evangelical circles outside the Southwest. And it happens to be the world’s largest Protestant seminary: the Southern Baptist Convention’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

Rough and Tumble Roots

The world of the Southern Baptist Convention and its relationship to the larger evangelical subculture is analogous in many ways to the relationship between Texas—the huge state that was once its own republic—and the rest of the United States. Both share many of the qualities, characteristics, and attitudes of their larger counterparts. But both the SBC and Texas are something apart. And both are so big (the SBC has an estimated 16 million members, and the Texas population is nearly 21 million) that they have an inherent tendency to forget that there’s actually another world outside their borders.

In the realm of theological education, Southwestern has fit nicely into both the Texas and SBC paradigms for decades. It has occupied the top spot in Protestant seminary enrollment since the late 1940s, when it surpassed the denomination’s old flagship, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. With more than 3,300 full-time students, it is larger than Fuller Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School combined.

Southwestern’s army of graduates has filled Southern Baptist pulpits across Texas and the Southwest, and it has long been the dominant source of SBC missionaries. But the SBC’s infighting of the last 25 years, and the resultant partisan maze that is Texas Baptist life in the early 21st century, means that the school may be emerging from its relative invisibility outside of Southern Baptist circles.

Southwestern traces its roots back to B. H. Carroll, a rough-and-tumble pastor of First Baptist Church of Waco, who founded the school as Baylor Theological Seminary in 1905. An imposing Confederate veteran who stood over six-foot-four and weighed 250 pounds, Carroll parlayed his fame as a preacher and Methodist-whipping polemicist into a central role in state Baptist circles.

Today his portrait hangs in the rotunda of Southwestern’s B. H. Carroll Memorial Hall. Legend has it that his hands are painted inside his coat pockets to hide his omnipresent cigar. “B. H. Carroll was a gun-slinging, cigar-smoking Texan through and through,” says Union University president and Southwestern alumnus David Dockery. “He possessed the sort of entrepreneurial, frontier mindset” needed to train workers in the untamed Texas of the late 1800s.

Baylor Theological Seminary was later authorized to withdraw from the erstwhile Baylor College and officially became Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1908. Two years later, the school relocated to Fort Worth.

Growing Pains

After World War II, Southwestern had ascended to its place as the SBC’s largest training ground for ministers. By the late 1960s, it was approaching 2,500 full-time students. As it strengthened its theological training, it clung to Carroll’s founding vision, emphasizing hands-on training.

While there were growing rumblings of liberalism at SBC seminaries, Southwestern rarely came up for criticism. When the struggle between SBC moderates and fundamentalists went full bore in the late 1970s, Southwestern—by then up to nearly 4,000 students—was virtually ignored in conservative broadsides against liberalism in high places. But the appointment of Atlanta pastor, Texas native, and Southwestern alumnus Russell Dilday as the seminary’s sixth president in 1978 thrust the seminary into the fray.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Dilday became identified as a moderate spokesman and routinely voiced his dismay about decisions by the SBC’s new conservative leadership. As a result, his own conservative-dominated board of trustees voted to dismiss him in 1994.

Southwestern’s trustees tapped Ken Hemphill, a North Carolina native with no Texas roots, as Dilday’s successor. Hemphill’s immediate task was quieting the sizable minority among students, faculty, and alumni distressed over Dilday’s firing. More recently he has faced the grumblings of faculty members put off by Southwestern’s tightening conservative grip. And last November, Hemphill “reassigned” the dean of the School of Theology after he struggled to bring some professors in line with a trustee requirement that all elected faculty sign the 2000 version of the SBC’s Baptist Faith and Message.

Broadening The Vision

Meanwhile, moderates started their own George W. Truett Seminary as a part of Baylor University in 1994, symbolically coming full circle back to Southwestern’s roots in the facilities of First Baptist Church of Waco—B. H. Carroll’s old church. Potentially more serious has been Southwestern’s relationship with the moderate-dominated Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT).

In October 2000, the BGCT—with a membership of more than 2.5 million Texas Baptists—voted to redirect $4.3 million in funds normally given to the six major seminaries controlled by SBC conservatives. It spread the funds among three Texas-based moderate schools: Truett, Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, and Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio. For Southwestern, that means a loss of $700,000 a year, and a threat to its traditionally rock-bottom tuition (less than $2,500 a year for SBC students).

“To this point our needs have been supplied by the gifts of individual churches and by the Southern Baptists of Texas,” Hemphill says, referring to the new, smaller, conservative rival of the BGCT.

For the future, Hemphill believes that Southwestern needs to go on broadening its influence, even while remaining true to its traditional emphasis. “I would like to see our faculty playing a larger role in the evangelical academic guild,” he says, “and see their publishing efforts begin to make a more significant impact beyond Southern Baptist boundaries.”

And he wants the seminary to attract more students from outside the SBC fold: “We are a confessional Baptist school, but we want to be a little more aggressive in letting the larger evangelical constituency know that their students are welcome here for theological training.”

Only time will tell whether the seminary, while allying itself more closely with the SBC, can in fact reach out to a denominationally broader world.

Larry Eskridge is associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

Related Elsewhere

Other stories in our May issue’s Dallas cover package include:

The New Capital of EvangelicalismMove over, Wheaton and Colorado Springs—Dallas, Texas, has more megachurches, megaseminaries and mega-Christian activity than any other American city.

Big City, Big MinistryHow did a top-25 list of ministries become a cover story on Dallas?

See the official Web sites for the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary and Dallas Theological Seminary.

For more on B.H. Carroll, see the Web sites of the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.

Last year, Ken Hemphill wrote “How Excellent Are Thy NamesWhat God invites us to call him says volumes about his relationship to us” for Christianity Today.

Related Christianity Today articles include:

SBC Funding ImperiledTexas Baptists resolved reduce monies for SBC seminaries and programs. (Sept. 25, 2000)

Submission RejectedState convention counters SBC marriage statement. (Dec. 27, 1999)

Texas Baptists Counter Official Southern Baptist Stance on MarriageBaptist General Conference of Texas goes back to 1963 statement, rejecting 1998 vote. (Dec. 11, 1999)