A former seminary professor and missionary who admitted sexual misconduct has sued a group of Southern Baptist Convention leaders and entities, claiming they conspired with an abuse survivor to ruin his reputation.In a complaint filed November 21 in the Circuit Court of Mobile, Alabama, David Sills, a former professor of missions and cultural anthropology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, admits he lost his job in 2018 due to what he called “morally inappropriate consensual intimate” conduct with a student.
Sills claims the situation was consensual and alleges that SBC leaders, including Southern’s president, Albert Mohler, turned his confession against him, labeling him as an abuser.
They did so, according to the complaint, as a public relations stunt, aimed at improving the SBC’s reputation during a national sexual abuse scandal. That public relations effort, according to the suit, included an investigation by Guidepost Solutions into SBC leaders’ handling of alleged abuse cases, which was made public earlier this year.
“David Sills was repentant and obedient to the rules of the SBC,” the complaint alleges. “Defendants saw him as an easy target; a bona fide scapegoat.”
The complaint names Southern seminary and Mohler, as well as the SBC’s Executive Committee, SBC President Bart Barber, and his predecessor Ed Litton as defendants, along with several other leaders. Also named as a defendant is Lifeway Christian Resources, a research and publishing arm of the SBC, and Guidepost Solutions.
It also names Jennifer Lyell, a former seminarian and vice president for Lifeway, who has repeatedly alleged that Sills was abusive, an allegation Mohler has also made on social media and in an interview for a documentary about the denomination’s response to its sexual abuse crisis.
Guidepost “perpetuated a false narrative in a Report, in exchange for payment and in concert with Defendants,” all of which ruined Sill’s reputation and labeled him as an abuser, according to the complaint.
Guidepost declined to comment, as did Lyell. The SBC Executive Committee and several other SBC leaders did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Lifeway was made aware of the lawsuit last week. Our legal team is in the process of reviewing the complaint and we do not have any further comment at this time,” said Carol Pipes, director of corporate communications.
Mohler also released a statement defending its handling of allegations against Sills.
“The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has followed best practices in this matter and has nothing to hide,” he said. “We will make this truth clear in any forum necessary and we will do so vigorously.”
In an email, Lyell said has told the truth and will continue to do so.
“I do not need to be under oath to tell the truth—and there are no lies that will shake my certainty about what is true,” she said. “This is why the most egregious, cruel lies do not leave me without hope when those asserting them are reckless enough to do so in a form that not only allows my witness but provides a clear means by which it will be formally provided.”
David SillsSills’ lawsuit reinterprets a widespread understanding that, rather than bolster the SBC’s credibility in preventing sexual abuse, the denomination’s treatment of Lyell has been a public relations disaster. The case has long been used by critics to show the SBC’s tendency to mishandle such allegations.
Lyell first came forward with allegations of abuse against Sills in 2018, reporting them to her then-supervisor Geiger and to Mohler and other seminary leaders. Mohler told Carolyn McCulley, the director and writer of the documentary Out of Darkness, that Lyell from the start had alleged Sills had been sexually abusive.
This past summer, Mohler issued a statement, saying that the abuse allegations had been investigated and confirmed. “Statements made by Sills in the course of our confrontation clearly confirmed the allegations of abuse,” he wrote in a statement posted on Twitter.
Sills resigned in 2018 after being confronted with the allegations, but the reason for his resignation was not initially made public. Sills, considered an expert at training pastors in the developing world, also lost his job as president of a missionary group called Reaching and Teaching, and was disciplined by his Louisville, Kentucky, church.
When he was hired by a different mission group, Lyell informed Baptist Press, an SBC publication, that he had been abusive and offered to write a first-person account of the abuse. Instead, Baptist Press wrote its own article about her experience.
At the last minute, the story was changed to say Lyell had had an “inappropriate relationship” with Sills. Though Lyell asked that the article be changed, Baptist Press officials and leaders at the SBC Executive Committee initially refused. Lyell eventually resigned from Lifeway, citing backlash from the article and harassment.
Baptist Press eventually retracted the article. The SBC Executive Committee apologized repeatedly to Lyell and reached a settlement with her.
The subsequent criticism from abuse advocates eventually led to calls for an independent investigation into how SBC leaders had treated abuse survivors. Leaders at the SBC Executive Committee tried to head off the investigation and, when they could not do that, tried to derail it.
Those attempts failed. The resulting Guidepost investigation and report found that SBC leaders had mistreated abuse survivors for years and downplayed abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy—even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” investigators wrote.
Attorneys for Sills claim that Guidepost never contacted their client, who is mentioned repeatedly in the Guidepost report. They also claim that allegations by Lyell, Mohler and others were part of a campaign to “falsely attack the honesty and the character of David Sills and Mary Sills, casting them as violent criminals.”
The complaint also alleges that Lyell wrote to Religion News Service, asking to review an article being written about the SBC abuse crisis, saying she “intended to advance her false narrative by taking a hand in the actual writing of an article by RNS.”
However, attorneys misidentified an email from Lyell, which was sent to a pair of ministers, not to RNS. Mississippi lawyer Don Barrett, one of the attorneys representing David Sills and his wife, Mary Sills, said that part of the complaint was in error.
Sills declined to speak to RNS.
Barrett declined to discuss the specifics of the lawsuit. However, he said that false allegations of abuse are harmful to efforts to protect women.
“The truth will come out in this litigation,” he said.
This headline seems to fall in the “man bites dog” category. From a professor (also dean and VP) of Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, we expect precise articulations of Reformed doctrine. Defenses of biblical inerrancy. Disquisitions on the priority of theology over experience.
We don’t expect a spirited exhortation to read thousand-year-old mystical texts.
But that’s just what we get in Carl Trueman’s article Why Should Thoughtful Evangelicals Read the Medieval Mystics. And it’s worth reading – whether you share Trueman’s Reformed stance or not. In a nutshell, after acknowledging difficulties, he enumerates four reasons we should read such luminaries of the Middle Ages as Bonaventure, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. For those wanting to cut to the chase, here’s my brief commentary on Trueman’s article.
Medieval mysticism? Surely not!
On the “con” side of the ledger, Trueman diagnoses the fact that many unchurched folks and many ill-informed Christians eat up paperback editions of the mystics because they are seeking an antidote to what they see as the excessively propositional faith of conservative churches. Living in a world in which “experience is the hallmark of authenticity,” such readers take the mystics’ experience to be “separable from or prior to religious belief,” and this attracts and comforts them.
Trueman likens this doctrine-allergic view of religious experience to such deceptive, escapist indulgences as “the increasingly fabulous special effects of movies” or “the intricate, kaleidoscopic plots of fantasy novels.” The mystics’ “highly symbolic and visionary manner of expression appeals to a world tired of propositions.” A superficial reading of the mystics allows such readers to dabble in the transcendent without submitting themselves to the rigors of biblical faith.
I’ll go at least partway with Trueman on this. An intellectually incoherent Christian religious experience is an experience that frankly is not very deep – it is not grounded in the truth of the gospel! I don’t believe you have to be an intellectual to be a faithful Christian (a belief that has often seemed to hover around the Reformed intellectuals I have met, akin to the kind of charismatic elitism that says you have to speak in tongues to be a faithful Christian). But you do, at least to reach the maturity that eats meat rather than sucking on a bottle of spiritual milk, have to have a firm grasp on the shape and content of the gospel testimony.
Other readers, adds Trueman, want to hold up the mystics as precedents and paragons for the enterprises of environmental theology and feminist theology. His antipathy to these enterprises goes well beyond mine (I’d say these are important theological conversations that can and must address some of the unpaid bills of Western theology), but it’s an interesting point.
Yes, Virginia, there are theologically grounded mystics
Despite these problems with how many folks read the mystics, Trueman believes the pros outweigh the cons: “I think the medieval mystics should form a staple of the literary diet of all thoughtful Christians,” he says. Why?
First, Trueman says that Christians today “live in a casual age when we stroll flippantly in and out of God’s presence.” We should read the mystics as a pointer toward our lost “sense of God’s holiness and transcendence.” I’m partially with him here: I once attended the service of a charismatic church in Massachusetts in which the communion elements were placed on a chair at the front of the gymnasium-cum-sanctuary, and while a song played, people came up to partake as and when they felt like it. All very well, but some of the children seemed to think the bread, wadded up, made neat projectiles, and the juice was good enough to merit coming back for seconds and thirds. No parent or other adult seem to feel it was important to intervene and correct these childlike impressions. This level of informality bespoke, to me, the kind of flippancy Trueman is addressing here.
However, although I’ve often seen Trueman’s Reformed compatriots issue blanket condemnations of charismatic churches for treating God as a buddy, singing about self rather than God, failing to revere God’s holiness, and so forth, my experience in such churches has usually been the opposite. That is, expressions of worship which may seem flippant or content-less to the “cultured despisers” – perhaps because expressive churches are often unschooled in the niceties of doctrine – have in fact been deeply God-centered. They have impressed on me thoughts of God’s transcendence that are both sublime and reverent. And interestingly, this seems to be something like what Trueman is saying: mystical modes of experience can indeed lead us into a deeper sense of God’s holiness and transcendence, and reading the medieval mystics can be one route to that deepening (as charismatic worship can be another such route).
Second, Trueman points out that Christian mysticism has not historically meant chucking robust theological understanding or doctrinal fidelity out the window. His Exhibit A is Thomas Aquinas, but you can go to the writings of almost any medieval mystic and see that for them, experience “is ineradicably doctrinal and connected to distinct beliefs.” Of course, as he notes, some of those beliefs would not be shared by Reformed evangelicals. But the point is that their experiences were tied to and structured around their theological understandings of the biblical witness. Truth first, experience after. I am less insistent on this priority than Trueman and others who share his Reformed convictions. But I agree that the mystics’ experiences and their devotional writings are thoroughly grounded in doctrine and Scripture.
Third, medieval mystics often practiced apophatic or “negative” theology, which turns some evangelicals off: We want to emphasize the “positive” statements about God found in Scripture – specific revelations about his character, his relationship with humanity, and the nature of his economic Trinity as he sets about repairing that relationship. Nonetheless, when it comes to the mysteries of the immanent Trinity, we share the mystics’ apophatic bent, whether we know it or not. Words we use about God’s essential nature, which we think fall into the category of positive, concrete statements about God, turn out to be negations: “Infinite means without limits. Impassible and immutable mean without suffering or change,” and so forth.
And, I would add, beyond this apophatic bent of our own theological language, most modern evangelicals have a common-sense understanding of the “fragility and inadequacy of language” to address “the transcendent mystery of God.” This is not a problem for us, and it should not put us off of reading the mystics that they sometimes press this claim of ineffability when talking about their experiences. As Trueman puts it, “medieval mysticism is sometimes closer to our theology than we realize.”
Reading the mystics as preparation for evangelism
Fourth and finally, Trueman finds a most compelling reason for us to read the mystics in the very fact that many unchurched and anti-church folk are reading them. These are books, as he points out, available in popular Penguin editions at any major bookstore. You don’t have to look to “specialist presses that serve the narrow evangelical community” to find these mystics.
Returning to his opening remarks, Trueman concludes that “in an age that craves transcendence and mystery to lift it above the banality of a bankrupt consumerism, these authors seem to have struck a chord.” Those who are reading them are probably not “reading them aright.” But don’t let that stop you from looking at the books read by the disaffected and the anti-church – books that “shape their spiritual aspirations” and feed their “critique of contemporary church life.” In the end, “an acquaintance with the medieval mystics will not just enhance your knowledge of the Middle Ages; it may also equip you better to reach out to the lost souls of the current generation.”
Amen!
Now the question is, to which modern evangelical specialists in medieval Christianity can we turn for interpretive assistance as we read the mystics?
That’s easy, we’ll read Doctor . . .
Umm, we’ll go to Professor . . .
Hmm. Tom Oden, Christopher Hall, D. H. Williams,. . . It seems that these and most other scholars who agree with Bob Webber that “the path to the church’s future runs through our past” are convinced that all the good stuff is to be found in the first six centuries of the church. The unspoken, but nonetheless potent assumption seems to be that after, say, Gregory the Great, the church becomes so hopelessly corrupt as to be more toxic than nourishing as a resource for modern Christians.
But if Carl Trueman of Westminster Theological Seminary says that not all the good stuff is to be found in the church’s first few centuries, then I won’t disagree!
So who do we turn to for guidance in this area?
There are a few evangelical scholars specializing in medieval Christianity, but books on this period from evangelical presses are still thin on the ground.
Likewise, a few evangelical seminaries offer courses on the medieval church as a discrete topic, and not just as fly-over country hurried through by the professor in the midst of the church history survey course. But in our seminaries these voices are all but drowned out by the chorus of Reformation and early church history courses, which in turn are drowned out by the deafening roar of biblical studies courses.
In other words, evangelicals seem very little attuned to the medieval period, apart from a small minority of scholars and a small but growing interest in medieval spirituality, led by such authors as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard.
So what do you think? Is Trueman right? Should the medieval mystics “form a staple of the literary diet of all thoughtful Christians”? I’d love to hear from you on this.
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Christian History and Biography explored the Middle Ages in 10 of its 99 issues. Explore those issues here.
