Former Southern Seminary Faculty and Other Baptist Scholars Join Petition Seeking Reparations

Former faculty members at a Southern Baptist Convention seminary and Baptist professors at other schools have joined a call for financial reparations to American descendants of slavery. The call appears in a petition on change.org, which is collecting signatures online.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler and board chairman Matt Schmucker turned down a request from a coalition of Black and white pastors in Louisville, Kentucky, where the seminary is located. The coalition asked the seminary to “transfer a meaningful portion” of its financial wealth to Simmons College, a historically Black institution with ties to non-SBC groups, including the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

The coalition, called Empower West, is co-chaired by Simmons College President Kevin Cosby and retired white pastor Joe Phelps. Both are graduates of Southern Seminary, the oldest of the six seminaries under the control of the Southern Baptist Convention. The denomination was formed in 1845 to defend the appointment of missionaries who owned slaves.

A number of scholars associated with the seminary before the “conservative resurgence,” a shakeup that forced them to find careers elsewhere, have added their names to the petition. The petition calls on Southern Seminary to join historic schools, including Georgetown, Princeton, Furman, Wake Forest and the University of Virginia, which the petition says are “considering an act of repentance and repair for their roles in slavery.” New signers include professors who left Southern in the 1980s and 1990s and students who later built academic careers outside the SBC. Three of them went on to become seminary presidents, including Molly T. Marshall, who retired from Central Baptist Theological Seminary, and Linda McKinnish-Bridges, who led Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. That seminary, which opened in 1991, recently ceased operation for budgetary reasons. Other signers include Bill Leonard, Glenn Hinson and Walter Shurden, former Southern faculty members, along with several current professors at other institutions.

Mohler and Schmucker told the Empower West group that it would not be “appropriate” for the seminary to transfer significant funds to an institution outside the denomination’s sphere of control. They added that any such transfer would have to adhere to the Baptist Faith & Message, the denomination’s confessional statement. The statement, the source notes, establishes husbands as the head of their household and forbids women from serving as pastors.

Mohler told Religion News Service reporter Adelle Banks: “We’re not going to respond to public demands for reparations made, quite interestingly, by the people who demand that the reparations be paid to them. And, furthermore whatever we do, this institution will do in keeping with its theological commitments.”

Cosby, who is also senior pastor of St. Stephen Baptist Church in West Louisville, responded on Twitter: “How convenient, the institution that created the crime gets to determine what the consequences should be!” On June 5, he tweeted: “Please sign this petition calling for the Southern Baptist Seminary to pay reparations for their crimes against humanity. Southern was started by slave owners for the purpose of maintaining slavery. They like no other institutions gave the theological rationale for slavery and Jim Crow.”

Source: Read the original report