Inquisition at a Southern Baptist Seminary?

Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson says today that Dr. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, is using the economic implosion to dump Calvinist professors. Who will hit the street, and how soon, is not made clear.

John Calvin

Burleson, an outspoken former member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, does report there was a staff gathering yesterday at which some whose heads are on the block were cross-examined, albeit not quite stretched on the rack.

The details of today’s brief Burleson blog may be hotly debated. One commenter already says there was no such professorial gathering at SWBTS. Yet there is no denying that Anti-Calvinism has been on the march in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Someone should note that the Batholics and Cathists are merely continuing to destructively exercise the institutional power which came to their hands with the conservative takeover of the SBC as the result of a running battle from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The losing moderates predicted that conservatives would soon begin driving out the somehow insufficiently fundamentalist.

Burleson has, in this most recent blog and elsewhere, resisted that narrowing. He argues that doctrinal diversity is indispensable to a healthy SBC. He argues that a spirit which “demands doctrinal conformity,” like the demands he says are being made at SWBTS, is destructive to the entire denomination.