The previous article makes several references to Honeycutt’s successor, Al Mohler, and his constant dragging of the Seminary in Louisville into the theological dark ages with him and all his “takeover-witch-hunt” cronies in the leadership of the SBC in the 80’s.
Ethics Daily continues:
After Garland’s firing, Mohler and the seminary trustees launched a study to determine whether the seminary could maintain a social work school. Eventually, the trustees and Mohler concluded that the tenets of the social work profession were incompatible with the core beliefs of the seminary.
I had Roy Honeycutt for the introductory Old Testament course my opening semester, but he soon had to step into the Seminary President position when McCall went down. The rest of the semester we got to have Eric Rust, who was an Ethics/Old Testament professor in semi-retirmement (and a crusty old codger he was , too, but good)
Carlos points out that Honeycutt had taken the Seminary in directions that Mohler and his ilk could not stand (like “Social Work”. Imagine that. Training people to minister by seeking to uphold the less fortunate. Heresy! And for Mohler, obviously irrelevant to his concept of God).
I wonder how Al Mohler interprets the Book of Acts, then.
Let’s be honest. Yes or No? When Mohler arrived did any of the professors at SBTS in that department affirm the Abstract of Prinicples for the Seminary that had been in effect from the time the seminary was founded or not? Was the mission of the social work department and profession coherent within those guidelines or not?
Dr. Mohler sees value in social work, as do all the staff members at the seminary. However, they also understand that SBTS is owned by the SBC, which has the right to require that the programs and professors of SBC institutions actually affirm the mission statements and abstracts of principles of the seminaries themselves. That was the issue at that time.
OK, I’ll be honest. The “Abstract of Principles” has been made into something quite anti-Baptist. A DOGMA, that has been made REQUIREMENT by the fundamentalist, irrelevant, inactive, mind-numbing, doctrinaire, self-centered intellectual idolatry that has become the “educational” approach of the Southern Baptist Seminaries. Mohler, and all the rest of them, have replaced Christ as the measure with “right doctrine”, and this is what this is all about. They’ve replaced Christ with THEMSELVES. They’re sickening.
One more thing.
The Abstract of Principles, as you said, were always around. Difference is, it wasn’t until Mohler and his fundy cronies came along and started insisting that you take them and interpret them the same way they do the Bible: which means, for them, THEIR WAY or the HIGHWAY. They actually took their “Statement of Faith” and CHANGED the wording so that THEIR sense of the original language was made even more “authoritative”. Gone is the sense of “sole competency”, and in is the authoritarian, self-centered, arrogant , cocky fundamentalism that has driven scores away as they draw closer to the culture they say they disdain, and away from the Christ they claim to follow.