Al Mohler, of all people, is complaining about academic diversity and freedom. he , who is the SBC planted “conservative replacement” for the previous Southern Baptist Theological Seminary presidents, Duke McCall and Roy Honeycutt. Basically, all the professors that I had when I was there are gone. If they’re not retired, they’re teaching somewhere else.

Mohler has the blindness and the gall to complain in this manner:

many campuses are devoid of the intellectual diversity that marks a genuine academic experience. In the name of “diversity” the elite academic institutions have opened the door of debate in only one direction–toward an ambitious embrace of every radical and leftist ideology.

For one thing, Mr. Mohler, conservatives can’t seem to stand it when they have it (intellectual diversity). It’s “heresy” to stand for it in the minds of the present SBC Leadership. Another thing is, wherever those same conservatives feel comfortable is in the dogmatic , repressive environment that all those former Southern Seminary profs found to be too much distraction to put up with, and too much of a hindrance to doing their real ministries, and so they left to find a body of Chrsit who honored their calling.

You have NO PLACE to stand in this argument, since you so clearly consider diversity and academic freedom in the seminary context to be narrowly defined to you and uyour cronie’s severely crippled and judmental theology.

As Mohler challenges hiring practices by these “liberal institutions”, he seems blind to the reality that there is a lack of conservatives because most of them don’t want to be associated with “those liberals”, and also do not want to be in a diverse environment. They’ve been schooled that way by their upbringing in conservative churches that demonize the left (or what they CALL “the left”).

Mohler and his types have destroyed the Southern Baptist Convention’s previous embodiment of the best example of this diversity. In the days when I was a college student and preparing to enter seminary, I was struck by how much variety of theological experience one could find in the Baptist Studnet Union, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. There were also those, in my Baptist Student Union, who were headed to seminary, but they were going not to Southern, which was 3 hours away, but to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, because Southern was “liberal”, and I even heard the description “cold” applied. When I got there, I was wondering where they ever got that notion.

What it turned out to be, was that Southern had a “mix”, and a broad coverage of theology that I value now more than ever. This is what the fundamentalists fear (I won’t call them conservatives….and I often catch and correct myself and rephrase to “fundamentalists”…or “Pharisees”. They’re the ones who consistently confuse “the Word of God” with their own interpretation of that Word. Their approach and conclusions become the assumptions and the ammunition for the attack on diversity.