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Forty years ago Southern Baptist Convention President Herschel Hobbs looked over the capacity crowd of messengers gathered in Kansas City for the denomination’s annual meeting, unable to finish reading the proposed revision to the Baptist Faith and Message. It appeared to him as though the crowd had begun swaying back and forth.
Noticing that her husband appeared dizzy, Hobbs’ wife feared he was having a heart attack and pled with him to return to their hotel and consult a doctor. He refused and years later recalled saying, “Hon, I must stay here for any debate which may come. I feel that it is so important that this report be approved. I am willing to die on this platform, if necessary, in order to see to its adoption.”
Hobbs was battling a persistent bronchial infection and sat down as the committee’s vice chairman finished reading the first revision ever made to the Baptist Faith and Message. “Naturally, it was a matter of great interest to the messengers,” Hobbs recalled. With only a few failed attempts to modify the language, the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message was approved with only scattered dissent.
The Oklahoma pastor had spent most of his tenure as SBC president looking for a way out of the theological crisis that consumed the denomination. Behind the scenes he had met and corresponded with SBC Executive Committee President Porter Routh, Sunday School Board President James Sullivan and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Millard Berquist find a way out of the firestorm that was brewing.
“For several years the feeling had been growing that certain elements among Southern Baptists were drifting toward liberalism,” Hobbs told a 1978 Historical Commission gathering. “The matter threatened to come to an explosive head at the Convention in San Francisco” in 1962, he said. “Some even predicted that the Convention might divide.”
Hobbs felt that a call for a new confession of faith would curtail criticism over Broadman Press printing Midwestern Seminary professor Ralph Elliott’s critical treatment of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. “This book was not the cause but the occasion for a strong protest by many,” Hobbs remarked.
“If, in 1962, Midwestern’s administration and trustees, and the Sunday School board’s editors had concluded that Ralph H. Elliott’s writings were incompatible with Southern Baptists’ doctrinal confession, the crisis might have been headed off,” wrote Baptist historian Jerry Sutton in his book The Baptist Reformation. Those acknowledgements, along with conservative parameters for the Broadman Bible Commentary and the admission of some problems by seminary presidents, might have stopped the emerging movement in its tracks, Sutton concluded.
Instead, Midwestern President Millard Berquist backed Elliott during trustee inquiries into the substance of Elliott’s Message of Genesis. Only a few years into his administration of the SBC’s youngest seminary, Berquist found himself caught in the middle?defending a professor considered by many to be teaching outside the bounds of Southern Baptist doctrinal beliefs?while opposing a call for a special meeting of trustees to “get the dirty work done” to fire Elliott.
Berquist regarded Elliott’s manuscript as “one of the finest pieces of biblical scholarship produced by Southern Baptists since the days of Dr. A. T. Robertson and Dr. H. E. Dana,” according to a letter he sent to Broadman editors. He and Elliott appealed to professors at other Southern Baptist seminaries and colleges for support, soliciting 40 such letters that they shared with trustees. (See related article demonstrating widespread support. These and other letters in which Southern Baptist leaders express their concerns are a part of Midwestern Seminary’s library archives.)
The Midwestern president wrote Routh to say he feared “the loss to Southern Baptists of one of the most able and devout scholars in Southern Baptist ranks,” asking the Executive Committee leader for advice in fighting “the intensive campaign” to “crucify Elliott.”
By January of 1962, even Sullivan expressed reservations about reprinting the book, making it clear to Elliott that it wasn’t a done deal. He questioned whether the book would be used beyond Midwestern’s classrooms, a point that infuriated Elliott who saw his work as having broader appeal.
“No one regrets any more than do I the horrible furor which has been created with reference to The Message of Genesis,” he responded to Sullivan. He defended his “honest effort to understand its [the Bible’s] message as dynamic and relevant for our age.”
Elliott told Sullivan, “Few of our seminary professors have ever held to the mechanical dictation view as desired by the critics,” blaming an organized campaign by a few men for causing the uproar. A few days later Berquist wrote Sullivan as well, expre
